In the post-COVID times we are living, deliveries have become the order of the day so when, a couple of weeks ago, my doorbell rang and in reply to my “Who is it?”, I heard a polite voice saying. “Delivery, Mr Aquilina”, it was pretty run of the mill.

I opened the door, asked what I had this time and he smilingly said: “It’s the book, sir.”

It was a book I had ordered and been waiting for. Not just any book but the book. There it was in its plain and elegantly designed cover, flaunting the Pilatus Bank logo. It was Robert Aquilina’s exposé of the whole affair and the many ramifications that placed it squarely at the heart of the country’s situation when it comes to the severely dented rule of law and our non-functioning institutions.

That same evening, I dug into it and, as I read through chapter after chapter, I could not believe what I was reading and that all this had taken place in my beloved country, an EU member state to boot.

This bank came to Malta after its operations in Switzerland had come under scrutiny and its owner had sought another base where he could operate.

Even after the bank was exposed and ordered to shut down and the Maltese taxpayer had invested over €7 million on a magisterial inquiry into the whole affair, the rot that has infiltrated and corrupted our institutions was still actively at work, preventing the truth from coming to light.

How can our attorney general justify requesting the inquiring magistrate’s original signature on each one of the over 600,000 pages of his report and attachments, other than as a blatant foot-dragging exercise?

And, then, when these signatures are provided, sending everything back because she wanted the signatures on both sides of the pages – another 600,000+ signatures.

Then when this red tape request was acceded to, something else happened.

Notwithstanding the results of the investigation by the foreign forensic accounting experts commissioned by the court and notwithstanding the clear direction given by the inquiring magistrate to prosecute six people in connection with the alleged crimes committed under the Pilatus umbrella, a nolle prosequi was signed by the attorney general.

To be quite honest, I had to ask some lawyer friends of mine exactly what this is and they explained that, in effect, it was a decision not to prosecute – a pardon before the trial.

That way, a trial was to be avoided at all costs, so the pardon had to be issued before to prevent this.

Incidentally, just a few months before, that same attorney general had requested arrest warrants to be issued against those two people that she had now decided not to prosecute.

Having done this, the police were ordered to work all night long in order to justify this decision, retrospectively.

In my humble view, the police are there to work to dig up evidence about criminal behaviour in order to prosecute and not to go to extra lengths to find excuses not to. That would be so in a normal country, however, and Malta has become anything but normal.

Books have changed the world for the better, in spite of tyrants’ worst efforts- Eddie Aquilina

Reading the book, I was at first plagued by feelings of despair. After all, in the face of such institutional role-reversal, how could one hope that we could ever return to a semblance of normality?

The book had not materialised from thin air. It had been written by one courageous individual, Aquilina, who had been fed information by public officials who still believe in a sense of right and wrong. That gave me hope.

After all, history has shown us over and over again that the pen is mightier than the sword.

As I am writing this piece, I have just bought another book, this time relating the truth behind the whole Vitals-Steward fraudulent deal and these two books are now battling it out in my mind for the title of talking about the most corrupt events that have taken place since 2013.

In this atmosphere of public broadcasting repression, a book is a lasting document one can read in one’s own time and absorb its information slowly and rationally. This is a new yet traditional and time-tested, way of disseminating the truth.

Michael Foot, the British politician who served as opposition leader and Labour Party leader from 1980 to 1983, in the foreword to his book, The Pen and the Sword wrote that “Jonathan Swift has been called ‘the prince of journalists’”.

Aquilina has surely laid his own claim to that title with his bold publication that flies in the face of all attempts to keep the truth from us.

The prime minister saw fit to mock books, glorifying ignorance because it suits his purpose. Many have been those in the past who have attacked the wisdom and knowledge to be found in between pages.

There were those who publicly burnt books and destroyed whole libraries.

The prime minister’s words seem to be a step down that path.

He would do well to think twice and to learn from the lessons of history. Books have changed the world for the better, in spite of tyrants’ worst efforts.

Aquilina’s book is an eye-opener and I ended up the richer for having read it. However, I again borrow another sentence from Foot’s foreword, the concluding one: “… let the reader judge”.