A little matter of urgency

The police shoulder a heavy burden to maintain law and order. They employ the methods and techniques required to do so, some of them well-known, others rather obscure. I came across this obscurity when I served as Minister of Finance in the 1980s.

Now and again I would be asked to approve expenditure by the police which could not be fully accounted for. I jibbed the first time the request was made. It was outside my understanding of transparency and accountability.

It was explained to me that the amounts were required to pay informers whose identity could not be revealed by the police officers who ran them. For better or for worse I was persuaded to approve the expenditure, which consisted of small sums.

That experience gave me some understanding of the grey area police officers have to travel in their investigations in the criminal world. I do not know whether that practice is still in force. I do know and believe, however, that the police force as a major instrument towards a high level of law and order necessary in a democracy, must be as open as can be, and uniform in their treatment of alleged wrongdoings.

Which is why I confess to being more than perplexed that the police felt they had to arraign the (then) Sliema mayor with urgency in the night.

It was up to the police to determine whether they had sufficient grounds to charge Nikki Dimech with a criminal offence. But what could have suddenly emerged in the four hours of interrogation that evening, which presumably lent urgency to the arraignment?

The investigation had been going on for weeks. Early on, Dimech signed a confession but later declared he had done so under duress. He professed both innocence as well as a measure of inadequate treatment. The latter allegation, it was reported, angered the police officer who conducted the interrogation during which the mayor signed a confession.

One understands such anger if Dimech’s allegation was false. That said, emotion has no part in police investigations, other than unavoidable abhorrence when some abominable crime is discovered, a gruesome murder, cruelty, paedophilia, that sort of thing. And even then, the outcome still has to be the result of cold assessment.

It is not for anyone other than Dimech and his defence team to query the contents of the charges laid against him. But the urgency of the arraignment remains strange, at least to non-legal people like me.

I hold no brief for Dimech, whom I do not know. Like all those charged in a court of law he remains innocent until proven guilty. Not so for the Nationalist Party, to which he belonged and which had presented him as a paragon of what a typical budding Nationalist politician should be.

Nor can I have any idea what his trial will throw up or how it will end. But I would like to be surer that the police had a watertight reason for hauling him before our courts with urgency, as if he were someone who was going to fly way from their reach on his private plane the moment they let him go. They had already let him go before in the course of their investigation. He did not flee.

The one reason for the urgency I detected from the press reports of Dimech’s arraignment was an allegation that he had attempted to get at an important witness through third parties, and might do so again. Was that enough reason to trigger the full panoply of a formal charge at night?

Aside from the byways and highways of the issue and the embarrassment that the case created for the Nationalist Party, especially coming as it did along with a spate of other charges and confessions of councillor misdemeanour, it is essential to continue to feel, as I do, that we have a police force we can look up to, in any circumstances.

The arraignment by the police of Dimech brought to mind once again the way the contract for the Delimara power station extension was awarded.

Here we are talking of a massive outlay of public funds. The procedure followed has raised the hackles of the European Commission on two clear counts. One of them is the moving of the goalposts late in the game in a manner which, the Commission feels, discriminated in favour of the company which was awarded the tender, and against the main tenderer in the running.

Thus spoke the Commission in a letter not published by the government. It is now weighing the reply of the Maltese authorities in a letter which, again, remains close to the government’s chest.

But there is more to it than that – enough not to allow the Auditor General to conclude, after months of investigation, that he could not exclude that there was soft corruption. I say that, of course, because that watchdog of the public purse reported that he found no hard evidence of corruption.

Supposition aside, it is a fact that the agent of the company that won the tender because the government moved the goalposts had written to his bosses that he would have to go higher up the political tree in his effort to win them the desired prize (my words, but the meaning was clear in the agent’s letter).

Was that agent ever investigated by the police as to what he meant? Shouldn’t he be investigated? I, for one, think he should.

By all means, clean out the local council stables: too much dirt has accumulated there. It is small stuff compared with the profit on the millions involved in the Delimara extension affair. The matter, surely, is urgent.