In a country that has read a new story about bribery and corruption most Sundays of the last 10 years, you wouldn’t think that yet another episode of graft and abuse of power would feel odd to anyone.

If you’ve been following the same daytime soap opera for the last 30 years, the only thing that would ever feel remarkable is the absence of another absurd plot twist. And yet, the sight of Pakistani websites reporting in esoteric detail about invoices raised by Chris Fearne’s closest associate had that bewildering effect of watching pigs fly.

In Maltese we have a phrase: ma naħlef għal ħadd. I can only be sure of my own innocence is perhaps how Descartes might translate that. I can certainly not make assumptions about Fearne being above corruption and it would be silly to dismiss allegations on the back of what from a distance I might think his character to be.

And yet, reading those Pakistani websites, I had an uncomfortable feeling of being manipulated.

Parenthesis. I realise, of course, the allegation is not that Fearne solicited and received bribes. The allegation is that his closest aide and his appointee as head of the state health agency, Carmen Ciantar, did. And yet it would be foolish to ignore the consequential responsibility of Fearne if the allegations are true, and, if the allegations are false, it would be foolish to ignore the damage to Fearne their author intended.

The allegations of corruption make a claim for credibility.

Firstly, because of all the details included in the reports. They trace money transfers across companies, the existence of which is either already established or likely verifiable.

The source of the information, therefore, whether the information is truthful or not, is intimately familiar with the inner workings of the first discredited hospitals concessionaire.

Secondly, the websites have covered the VGH scandal before and their interest makes sense given the nationalities of some of the beneficiaries of that scam. Pakistan is not exactly around the corner but a story about bribery set in Malta and involving VGH is not out of place in Pakistan as it would be somewhere random like, say, Peru.

Thirdly, it’s well-written. We’ve seen disinformation campaigns in Malta before. I’ve been the target of a couple. Repubblika, the organisation I work for, also.

But those planted stories are usually self-consciously ludicrous and replete with self-evident and grotesque errors. The author of one of the more recent planted stories on Repubblika seemed to believe Daphne Caruana Galizia was a man.

Those silly stories seem designed to be so banal as to be beneath lawsuits. But this week’s story in Pakistani websites is not like that at all.

If it had been first published in Malta and a defamation suit had not yet been filed, we would all be seeing that for an implicit admission of guilt.

The allegations in the Pakistani websites however leave a metallic aftertaste. They cast a shadow of intrigue, a suggestion that this story seems to be what it does not seem to be, if you will indulge me the confusing turn of the phrase.

If the allegations are false, it would be foolish to ignore the damage to Chris Fearne their author intended- Manuel Delia

The Pakistani websites quote “leaked documents” which they claim prove the bribery happened, though the leaked documents are not published.

That does not necessarily mean they don’t exist. If the websites are certain of their claims, they are under no obligation to publish the evidence. But it has to be asked, why didn’t they?

The allegations are very specific about the time frame in which the bribes were solicited and settled. That time frame starts before Ciantar’s transition from the state utilities billing company to the state health agency.

Although for completeness’ sake, at the time, the state utilities billing company was in Konrad Mizzi’s department while he was also handling the hospitals privatisation. It doesn’t look good on anyone to have been in the same room as Mizzi.

Over the last five years or so, we have on many occasions seen Fearne lift himself to great heights, going on about his purity, and distancing himself from the disgrace which Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi earned themselves.

He has protested his virginal innocence more consistently than Joan of Arc, although quite why he seems to believe that gives him a licence to treat anyone objecting to his former colleagues’ well-documented alleged corruption with haughty disdain and petulant arrogance is, for me at least, impossible to understand.

Before Muscat was forced to resign, Fearne was strategically circumspect, keeping a distance from his prime minister without being so outspoken as to risk being accused of disloyalty by Labour voters.

We see him play the same in-and-out game with Robert Abela as he seeks to avoid sinking, tied down by the weight of the prime minister’s as yet unexplained wealth.

Whoever placed those stories in the Pakistani websites knew just what would happen. Fearne’s thundering claims of purity have been severely undercut. Anyone in the Labour Party who might have been tempted to rally around him has now been denied an untainted alternative to Muscat and Abela. If everybody is corrupt, Labour voters are told, they must learn to embrace corruption.

In the meantime, Fearne and his closest political aide have been reduced to grovel outside the police commissioner’s office to get him to get out of the bed and clear their name. Our police are notoriously slow at investigating offshore money flows where there’s a politician at the end of covert transactions.

The hidden hand behind the Pakistani stories knows that very, very well.