There was once a US judge who said they weren’t sure how to define pornography. But, they said, they were certain they would recognise it when they saw it.

There are academic debates about the criteria to describe a society as a kleptocracy, a place where the rulers use the country’s resources to enrich themselves. There’s no need to get into these debates except to note that there is now an evolving understanding of enrichment.

Politicians who capture a State for their own benefit define that benefit as more than bags of cash or stashes hidden in coconut islands. They seek the perpetuation of their power, the retention of their status and the permanence of their influence.

The benefits fraud racket, exposed by this newspaper in the last couple of weeks, shows just what’s going on in a paint-by-numbers simplicity that contrasts with the complex and esoteric schemes of the hospitals’ privatisation or the Electrogas contract.

It is right that taxpayers feel irritated that millions have been taken away from them in an act of vile pillage. The people who cashed the cheques are being charged in court and being forced to repay the money they took.

It is right that the doctors whose signatures were forged to make the scheme work feel aggrieved that they have been impersonated. Their indignation and their expectation that the matter is investigated and action taken against the forgers is understandable.

Fraud and forgery are part of any society outside Utopia. Neither element suggests there is something particularly evil about the governance of this society. But limiting the analysis of this scandal to fraud and forgery takes our eyes off the real motivation of the perpetrators of this conspiracy.

The motivation was neither to pretend they’re doctors nor to steal money. The masterminds wanted all that to happen to reach an altogether more sinister objective. They wanted to meddle with the democratic process, exploiting the needy despair of hundreds of poor people, or their ambivalent greed, or their unmitigated ignorance, in order to sell favours for votes.

This is how criminals and autocrats capture and retain power without abolishing elections. In place of anything quite so dramatic, they manipulate them and cheat at them, thereby ensuring for themselves a power permanence, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy of their re-election.

And they don’t bother to pay for this themselves. They plunder the State’s assets today – in this case its fund to support people with severe disabilities – to buy themselves the access and the means to be able to plunder the State’s assets tomorrow again.

The case bears other hallmarks of kleptocratic mania. Consider the sheer incompetence of the scheme. Doctors whose signatures were forged are remarking in court how even the most superficial glance at the letters they were supposed to have signed would have demonstrated how poorly they were written. They speak of misplaced abbreviations and random drafting that are far more obviously fake than their signatures.

Also, consider how hundreds of people were trusted to stick to the lie. The assumption they made that no one would give away what was going on is insanely sloppy.

Think of all the people who needed to be wilfully blind if not complicit for this to go on for so long- Manwel Delia

Or is it? For the truth of the matter is that this scheme could go on for years because this is a community of people that does not speak out.

The reasons are structural in part. There’s no whistleblower protection to speak of and the fear of punishment and retribution is inculcated in people who are reduced to ask their local minister to “do something” about the fact that they’re not making ends meet.

The reasons are cultural as well. This is a country of omertà, a nation of loud but silent people. Consider how the doctors sitting on the medical board thought their job was to confirm that the signatures of colleagues they trusted were on the papers handled by the beneficiaries. It did not occur to them that they were hired to check if the colleagues they trusted had broken their trust.

Consider how some of the hundreds who benefited unlawfully from the fraud admitted they knew the scheme was wrong and should land them in trouble but they shut up about it because they assumed everyone else would.

Consider the dozens of officials involved in the cycle of fabricating these documents and eventually processing them to the point that cheques were issued. Think of all the people who needed to be wilfully blind if not complicit for this to go on for so long.

For that to happen, you need a culture that seems happy and willing to be held up by the kleptocrats who exploit it. This is it. This is our country.

It’s the place where voters of the Labour Party wryly and frankly agreed that Joseph Muscat and his cronies were corrupt but defended that because, as they saw it, in the process, Muscat created a country where everyone could be a thief.

They meant that’s a good thing. Muscat’s euphemism for this national culture of larceny was “sinjuri żgħar”, small-time kleptocrats who stole the country’s landscape to build their block of apartments, the even smaller benefit fraudsters addicted to money for nothing.

Robert Abela is not worried. When it turned out he was the owner of an empty property who charged a monthly lease from invisible Russian oligarchs on the back of a questionable contract to cheat the country of its citizenship, nobody blinked. A monthly allowance plundered from the assets of the State was not going to hurt anyone.

Nobody blinks as Abela’s kleptocracy lives on.