The police commissioner and attorney general are sitting on magisterial inquiries to avoid having to prosecute people implicated in serious crimes, rule of law NGO Repubblika said on Saturday.
A number of inquiries into criminal allegations have been concluded for well over a year but magistrates’ recommendations to file criminal charges against certain people remain unfulfilled, Repubblika president Robert Aquilina noted.
Aquilina cited two such examples: an inquiry into Pilatus Bank that advised the police to press charges against bank officials, including its chairman Ali Sadr Hasheminejad, and an inquiry into Egrant allegations that called for former Nexia BT partner Karl Cini to face charges for perjury.
“We want results, and we want to see those results in the law courts,” Aquilina said.
The rule-of-law NGO held a press conference outside the Valletta law courts in which it made it clear that it would continue to campaign against corruption in the years to come.
“We will not allow the general election result to be used as a form of absolution for those who committed or was complicit in serious crimes, including corruption and murder,” Aquilina said.
Standing in front of the law courts building and an array of portraits of politicians and top officials implicated in scandals in recent years, Aquilina noted that prosecutions for corruption remained non-existent.
Four-and-a-half years had passed since Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed, he noted, but the police had yet to charge anyone with corruption - the underlying motive believed to be behind her murder.
Caruana Galizia was blown up in October 2017, at a time when she was combing through thousands of documents leaked from the Electrogas power station consortium.
A shareholder in that project, Yorgen Fenech, stands accused of complicity in her murder. But neither Fenech nor anyone else has been charged with corruption, Aquilina said.
“If the police believe Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed because of corruption, why has nobody been charged with that?” he asked on Saturday.
Aquilina listed a number of scandals that emerged in the past five years, including a shady Enemalta deal in Montenegro, the deal to hand three state hospitals to Vitals Global Healthcare, Panama Papers fallout and scandals at the now-shuttered Pilatus Bank.
“How can it be that in all these years, the police and attorney general have been unable to build a single case against anyone involved?” Aquilina asked rhetorically.