Last June, Robert Agius, accused of drug trafficking, was cleared of all charges in court. He had been arraigned over eight years before, in May 2012.
A woman travelling from Cairo transported two plastic blocks filled with heroin for which Agius was due to pay €1,500. The drug squad intercepted her and arranged for a controlled delivery. The woman waited at a fixed place. Agius and his brother drove up in a car, took delivery of the bag and passed the cash to the woman.
The police had replaced the drug with wooden slabs. The car was stopped and Agius was arrested and accused.
The court observed that the woman never testified and Agius flung the bag back out into the street.
The hard-drug trafficking charges were “not sufficiently proven” on the basis of the evidence presented.
Still, an open and shut case, if ever there was one. So how could Agius have been cleared of all charges? Did the court believe that Agius had commissioned an Egyptian national, who testified, to buy olives, oil and other foodstuffs?
But most worrying was that cocaine found at Agius’s house was not scientifically analysed to prove it was cocaine.
Agius was let off with a €500 fine for possession of a live bullet, an essential item if you are buying olive oil and olives.
Failing to test the drug in a drug case is tantamount to accusing somebody of murder without proving that anybody was killed, without having a death certificate of the victim. So what happened here?
Was this simply an inexperienced police officer who forgot that any suspect drug must be scientifically tested to present definitive proof in court? Was this just incompetence from inadequately trained police officers or lack of resources and testing facilities at the forensic lab?
Or could this be negligence by those investigating the case? Or an intentional lapse to let Agius off the hook?
Was it fear of personal retribution by Agius and his brother against police officers? Or pressure on those same police officers from someone in power – direct or indirect?
Institutions work extremely well for defence lawyers of mobsters and organised crime members- Kevin Cassar
Agius was not your ordinary petty criminal. Agius is one of the Maksar brothers. They have been reported to have ties to organised crime groups in Italy, Libya, Romania and even Albania.
Both brothers have been subjects of law enforcement investigations throughout Europe.
A man they were in business with, Terence Gialanze, vanished without trace in 2012.
He left behind a trail of huge debts generated by his lavish lifestyle but not before transferring his shareholding in the business to Robert’s brother, Adrian.
The same Maksar brothers have been named by middleman Melvin Theuma and Vince Muscat, il-Koħħu, as the suppliers of the bomb that killed Daphne Caruana Galizia. Before that, several people were murdered or maimed in car bombs allegedly provided by the same brothers.
Nobody has ever been charged with those crimes. Il-Koħħu’s family has been offered hush money by the Agius brothers to stop him revealing their involvement in serious crime.
In June 2018, Robert Agius, together with others, was accused of being involved in a cigarette smuggling racket. Some of his co-accused were jailed and fined half a million euros.
Agius was acquitted, again due to insufficient evidence.
It now transpires that our own Prime Minister Robert Abela defended the Agius brothers until at least 2016. Muscat, who is incriminating Abela’s clients, is requesting a pardon.
And, yet, Abela has until now refused to recuse himself from being involved in the request. The easiest thing for him, Abela stated, would be to “abdicate” from the case.
What is he waiting for? Everybody knows what the right thing to do is. He should not touch the case with a barge pole.
He mentioned the criteria used by the judiciary to decide that he does not need to recuse himself. But he’s not a magistrate or judge – he is the prime minister of an EU state. The standards expected are different.
Why does Abela keep taking the wrong decisions and saying the wrong things? He named Konrad Mizzi head of delegation to the OSCE assembly in January, before being compelled to kick him out of the party soon after.
He gave former police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar, now under criminal investigation for his links to the alleged middleman, a government consultancy post on public safety.
He is defending Joseph Cuschieri, the MFSA chief executive, who travelled to Las Vegas with Yorgen Fenech at the latter’s expense.
He persistently refused to wear a mask and undermined the efforts to control COVID-19.
He insists that institutions are working, when his client is repeatedly let off the hook after the scandalous failure to test a drug find.
Yes, the institutions work extremely well for defence lawyers of mobsters and organised crime members. The crooks are let off scot-free to continue to rake in millions, from making bombs, trafficking arms, drugs and human beings, with which to pay the lucrative fees of those very same lawyers who secured their freedom.
When those lawyers happen to sit in parliament or cabinet, or better still, happen to be the consultant of the prime minister or the prime minister himself, additional benefits might come, such as refusal of the pardon that exposes your crime.
When that same prime minister refuses to recuse himself from deciding on a pardon that might expose his ex-clients, those suspicions are strengthened.
Is it too much to ask for some normality?
Why are Labour’s prime ministers always on the side of the characters like Ali Sadr Hasheminejad, Ram Tumuluri, Hani Hasan Salah, Keith Schembri, John Dalli, Konrad Mizzi, Brian Tonna, Karl Cini, Lawrence Cutajar, Silvio Valletta, Karl Stagno Navarrra, Adrian Hillman, Neville Gafà, Yorgen Fenech, Ilham Aliyev, Chen Cheng, Milo Djukanovic, Melvin Theuma, Aldo Cutajar, and now the Maksar brothers?
How much longer do we have to endure witnessing our own prime minister defending the indefensible?
Kevin Cassar, professor of surgery and former PN candidate