Last December, the Maltese government gifted known and unknown criminals a tremendous boon. I complained about it wherever I could to whoever would listen. Not many people did. I wrote about it in my column here. I harangued government officials on the rare occasions when they had to sit in the same room as me. I even went to parliament when a smaller committee of MPs discussed a law change with their legal advisers. Opposition MPs briefly invited me to speak at the table where Minister Jonathan Attard also sat.

“Please,” I begged, “do not make these changes to the law governing temporary asset freezing.”

I wondered and continue to wonder why police investigators and prosecutors working for the Attorney General were okay with the government’s change. None of them seemed to be complaining, no one seemed to have a problem with the change, and no one seemed to be watching as it happened.

I summarise. If you catch a thief, it’s not enough to punish them for stealing. You need to take from them the stuff they stole. Otherwise, all a criminal needs to work out is how much they need to steal to make it worth the punishment they would get for doing it.

When criminals make money from a crime, part of making sure they pay is to take away the riches they accumulated from that crime. Because, you see, that’s the point of crime: getting rich.

The problem is that once you catch a criminal, you can’t instantly condemn them. You need due process to make sure they did it. That takes some time. In anticipation of their possible conviction, they can hide the loot. You might think of Walter White burying plastic barrels stuffed with cash in the desert. But organised criminals are smarter than high school chemistry teachers.

They’ll have laundered the money, made it look legit, deposited it in banks they can manage from their phones, and they can quickly secrete their wealth all over the world where it would be impossible for the authorities to find.

That’s why we had temporary asset freezes. You block the accused’s wealth directly as you charge them and don’t let them touch it during proceedings against them. If they’re acquitted, you give it back to them. If they’re convicted, you confiscate the goods for good.

It is possible that the wrong person is sometimes accused of a crime they didn’t commit. That’s a mighty inconvenience. You get arrested, charged, prosecuted, your reputation besmirched, your life put on hold while waiting for the state to fail to prove its case. If they’re also freezing your money while they do that, that’s also mighty unfair. That’s why we have due process: no justice system made by humans can be perfect, and we need to make sure no innocent person is ever locked up.

What makes all this even more unfair is that the justice system is glacially slow in this country. As terrible as it is to have your reputation harmed and your life frozen for two years while you are wrongly prosecuted, it is exponentially worse to have that happen to you for 10 years or more.

How can the state ease the pain of error? It can weaken its ability to prosecute crime because if fewer prosecutions happen, there’s a proportionately reduced chance of prosecuting the wrong people. Or it can reduce the time it takes to complete prosecutions. I submit that the latter path is logical because organised crime is real and needs fighting.

When criminals make money from a crime, part of making sure they pay is to take away the riches they accumulated from that crime- Manuel Delia

Last Christmas, the government argued that it was unfair that people still presumed innocent of the crimes they’re accused of are deprived of their wealth for years as proceedings against them are still ongoing.

It felt like they were clearing their throat just before announcing they were employing more judges and prosecutors, increasing courtrooms and investing in a more efficient justice system. That’s not what they did. Instead, they abolished temporary asset freezes.

I know they didn’t remove the principle from the law altogether. However, they inserted a requirement on prosecutors to substantially prove that a crime has occurred and quantify a monetary value for that crime very early in the proceedings, well before they can give the courts the evidence they need to convict the accused.

In other words, the government has locked up behind an impossibly encrypted lock, a tool which used to be ordinarily available to prosecutors in their arsenal of limited resources to fight crime. In theory, it’s still there. In practice, they can’t use it.

Last December, I suggested they were doing this because they were expecting Joseph Muscat to be charged with organised crime, and they wanted to spare him the inconvenience of an asset freeze. Maybe they did it for him. Maybe they didn’t.

What matters here is that in 2024, it’s harder for our state to fight organised crime than it was in 2023. That’s because of a change in the law introduced by Minister Jonathan Attard and adopted by his colleagues in cabinet and Parliament.

This week, Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg has been criticised for failing to meet the new law’s requirements to ensure that Yorgen Fenech’s assets remain frozen pending the completion of the case against him.

We need to be fair, even with her. The new law sets her up for failure. Under the new legal regime, there is no realistic way to retain Yorgen Fenech’s asset freeze, or anybody else’s, for that matter. She can’t do anything about that. By all means, criticise the Attorney General for never objecting (publicly) to the change in the law. She has the job of ensuring justice is served on criminals. The government has made it harder for her to do that. And she never complained.

A court order requires us to protect Fenech’s right to a fair hearing. However, that order does not extend to any obligation to protect the government from criticism of its failures, not to mention its wilful complicity with organised crime.

That’s what they did here. And though I hate to say it, last Christmas, I bloody told you so.