The internal police inquiry into why the police left it to the eve of the general election to serve former Alternattiva Demokratika chairman Harry Vassallo with an arrest warrant - which had been issued five months earlier - excludes any politically driven conspiracy.
In exonerating the police of any wrongdoing, the inquiry report, of which The Times has seen a copy, reads more like a Seconds From Disaster Documentary: It gives a blow-by-blow account of how bureaucratic mishaps and plain mismanagement aligned to facilitate something of a calamity.
An angry Dr Vassallo had accused the Nationalist Party of plumbing new depths in its campaign when he was served with the arrest warrant for a tax offence on March 5.
The warrant had been issued in October 2007 but Dr Vassallo was only served with it five months later, just three days before polling and two days before "silence day", during which he would not be able to react or clarify his position.
The fact that a NET News journalist inquired about the warrant hours before the police had served it, further supported the notion that the whole debacle was the result of a planned political conspiracy.
"The trap had been hidden away for months and the file left in some drawer until it would serve the PN," Dr Vassallo had said about the timing of the whole affair in a press conference called shortly after the police served him the warrant.
The case concerns VAT returns for a company in which Dr Vassallo was a director some 10 years ago. He had been fined €13,974 for not filing the company returns in time.
After he refused to pay the fines, insisting that he was no longer responsible for the company, they were converted into a two-year prison term in October 2007.
Dr Vassallo was unaware of this development until the PN media journalist questioned him about it.
The debacle reached fever pitch by the evening with then Opposition leader Alfred Sant accusing the government of fascist tactics. But even Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi expressed bafflement and suspicion during the leaders' debate on the eve of the election.
"Some wise guy decided to take something which was decided five months ago and which lay in a drawer for five months and now this wise guy decided to exercise this right or rather obligation against Harry Vassallo..." Dr Gonzi had said after his counterpart raised the issue earlier in the debate. But the report excludes the sort of ulterior motives the leaders of all three parties seem to have implied. Instead, the timing is explained by the Sliema police station's slow bureaucratic machine and a couple of unfortunate circumstances. The file arrived at the station on October 15 with a covering note by the Assistant Police Commissioner to report back action by November 19. By that time, however, the document had simply been bumped from one office to the other, registered and assigned to a police sergeant for perusal.
Yet, even at this stage, there was a snag. "The sergeant in those days was studying for his exam to become an inspector and it seems he was not getting much work done..." the report establishes.
On top of this, the report points out that, because hundreds of such arrest warrants are issued in connection with VAT reporting offences - which are known to carry draconian penalties usually resolved through a Presidential pardon - the warrant was probably not considered to be urgent. Still, senior police administration officers filed at least four notes, demanding that action be taken "ASAP" but they all went ignored. By February, the sergeant originally handling the case got promoted to inspector and his caseload was transferred to a new sergeant... whose wife happened to be pregnant.
The dynamics here changed completely because while the first officer was slow in his work because of the pending exam, the latter was eager to clear his in-tray before his wife gave birth and he went on leave.
A colleague of his, in fact, had warned about the timing on learning that the warrant concerned Dr Vassallo (the warrant referred to an Enrico rather than Harry Vassallo), but the sergeant was probably more eager to strike the warrant off the to-do-list, the report comments.
The board similarly concludes that there was no relation with the fact that the Net News journalist had inquired about the warrant hours before the police served Dr Vassallo with it.
Dr Vassallo himself came to this conclusion after looking into the matter in person after the election. He told the police that he had discovered that the NET News journalist had found out about the October 2007 sentence through the law courts documents. "So, to give my opinion, I no longer believed that there was a conspiracy which involved the police," the report quotes Dr Vassallo saying.
In its conclusion, the report exonerates the police completely of any wrongdoing in connection with the timing of the arrest warrant but calls on the Police Commissioner to take action to ensure that orders from the police's central management are executed "diligently and expeditiously".