There wasn’t a day since it became known that public hospitals would be privatised that the stench of corruption did not overwhelm the bleachy airs of the wards. It was early in the life of Joseph Muscat’s government, when a rush of rotten deals was presented as the country’s salvation: fuel and gas from Azerbaijan, passports for Russians, and our national health services given to faceless men with companies on coconut islands.

Daphne Caruana Galizia dug up the details relentlessly. The more secretive the contracts, the keener she was to flush them out. By June 2017 we knew enough for the PN opposition to commit they would reverse the sale, should they be elected to government. They weren’t.

By May 2019 Repubblika was convinced enough evidence was in the public domain to make this a long-outstanding police matter, one of many the police refused to touch. We asked a magistrate to start an inquiry into corruption and money laundering in connection with the hospitals’ sale.

In July 2019 an inquiry was ordered. That decision was quashed on appeal on October 3, 2019. We didn’t give up. The next day we went to court again with a fresh request for an inquiry. This time the inquiry happened, and it has been going on since.

That was but one of the final straws that opened the trap door beneath Muscat’s feet. Within less than three months he was no longer prime minister. But just days after his final official departure from Castille, he was back to meet his successor. Out of his prime minister’s business suit, Muscat wore the boiler suit of an advisor to Steward Healthcare, the company to whom the hospitals were sold by VGH, the first buyers of the hospitals.

In November 2021, Times of Malta reported that Muscat received fat payments from a Swiss company, which in turn received millions from Steward Healthcare when they acquired the hospitals with his blessing. You see, VGH could not sell on the hospitals without the government’s permission. Under normal circumstances, given that VGH had failed to deliver on any of its commitments, that permission would have been withheld. These were not normal circumstances. The discovery of the payments to Muscat explained why.

Repubblika made sure the ongoing inquiry into corruption at the hospitals found out about Times of Malta’s reporting. The inquiry must have picked that up. In January 2022, Muscat’s house was searched by the police.

A public power struggle ensued. Muscat addressed the nation over his mobile phone in selfie mode. His washroom urbi et orbi diatribes became legendary. He gave the speech from the scaffold of every corrupt politician in history to ever feel the heat of justice. Except that he spoke in Maltese, he could have been Manuel Noriega, Jacob Zuma, Ehud Olmert, Thaksin Shinawatra, Najib Razak, or any other of the eminent list of fallen crooks complaining of political persecution.

In public, he accused Repubblika of wilfully tormenting him. The motive? Apparently because “they cannot forgive me” for defeating the PN at the general election. The puerility of that charge would be as side-splitting as One TV’s notion that we are repeatedly condemned by the European Parliament, because MEPs envy Labour’s success, except that Muscat’s delusions could be clinical in which case it’s not polite to laugh.

Joseph Muscat gave the speech from the scaffold of every corrupt politician in history to ever feel the heat of justice- Manuel Delia

Also not a laughing matter is Muscat’s handling of the Labour Party as his marble flooring turns to lava. Muscat squeezes and Robert Abela squeals. In one of the current prime minister’s more egregious utterances, Abela implicitly accused the magistrate who ordered the search on Muscat’s properties as being motivated by something other than justice.

Abela did not sound like Noriega or Zuma. He sounded like their lawyer, much like he sounded that time when he was literally (not merely metaphorically) Muscat’s lawyer, and said that Daphne’s family’s request for an inquiry into their mother’s killing was not out of love for mother but out of hate for country.

Times of Malta traced the money which flowed into Muscat’s bank accounts to the hospitals deal which he oversaw as prime minister. They published the evidence which makes this all very public knowledge. The fact that the police ignored the evidence, as is their wont, does not reduce the self-evidently criminal nature of what happened. It is highly unlikely that a magistrate’s inquiry would not reach the same view.

We know from experience that when Muscat’s interests are concerned, a magistrate’s order to prosecute is no guarantee of an outcome. Consider how, in July 2022, Repubblika went to court to challenge the police commissioner and the attorney general for ignoring a two-year-old order from a magistrate to prosecute the owner of Pilatus Bank.

Angelo Gafà and Victoria Buttigieg were perfectly happy to ignore evidence that could have, should have, prosecuted Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad - the one man who could answer the question on the content of the bags he held when he slipped out the back door of his bank, when Daphne reported he handled a million-dollar bribe for Muscat (a claim Muscat denies). That’s one question Gafà and Buttigieg do not want to ask.

It would not just be inconvenient for Muscat if they did. It would cause great grief for Abela too, who leads the party that would have to answer to the country for what his party has done to it for the profit of its leaders.

A well-rehearsed play is about to unfold. The winds of winter will blow. Gafà and Buttigieg will mime corpses. Muscat will pull strings. Abela will dance. This will be interesting.