No sooner did the public learn that the Land Department has virtually ceased to apply the law on the illegal occupation of public land (with only 31 enforcements in 18 months, compared with an average of 170 a year in the previous five years), than it transpires that Enemalta is in the process of installing smart meters at the illegal boathouses in Armier.

The decision comes as the government seeks to ‘sanction’ the illegal shanty town.

This means, in plain English, that the government intends to make legal the theft of public land already committed by about 800 boathouse owners.

Worse, sources have stated that, when it comes to paying for electricity, only about one quarter of boathouse owners at Armier have an electricity meter.

The rest – about 600 – have been either illegally connecting to their neighbours’ electricity supply or siphoning off – unrecorded and unbilled - the government’s supply to the area through illegal connections to street lights and other public points there.

Armier boathouse owners have, therefore, not only usurped use of public land but also stole electricity on a massive scale. The chairman of the so-called Armier Development Ltd, however, in a perverse interpretation of theft and morality, saw “nothing wrong” with this.

“If there’s a service, it has to continue being provided… environmentalists have nothing to do with this, they should mind their own business.” He even had the gall to confirm that boathouse owners “had recently called to complain about the low voltage they were receiving”.

So, not only illegal, but also demanding better service and customer care as well.

This is the moral equivalent of advocating that breaking the law and stealing from the public purse are acceptable in Malta. They are not and the Prime Minister, who is now himself directly responsible for the Land Department, knows they are not.

The Prime Minister was overwhelmingly elected on a platform of cleaning up politics. In the first few months in office, he frequently expressed the view that a leader must lead and that his role as prime minister was to decide and to be ready to take the consequences. If he were now to say that tax evasion was an acceptable form of behaviour, all right-thinking citizens would be aghast. Yet, this is exactly what has happened over the sequestration of public land by people not entitled to it at Armier and elsewhere.

Public land in some of Malta’s most scenic coast-line, belonging by right to every Maltese citizen, has been stolen by a few hundred individuals who have built unsightly shacks on it without any retribution.Whereas the perpetrators of this illegal act should have immediately been charged with a crime and the illicit building demolished, the Labour government – and the Nationalist administration before them – is actively conniving in its committal by its lack of enforcement of the law and, perversely, by allowing mains services to be provided at the illegal sites.

By ‘sanctioning’ these illegalities and, moreover, supplying the boathouses with water and electricity, the Prime Minister and his government are sending a message that the rule of law in this country is negotiable.

Whatever he may think or say, the Prime Minister is acquiescing in whatever shady ‘agreement’ that has been reached, whether nor or before the last election, with the boathouse owners.

He is unwilling to offer the right and moral course of action in this case.

Law-abiding citizens have been betrayed... again.