It was already hard to keep up with the government’s corruption scandals a year ago, and it’s become nigh-on impossible now.

Stories like the Valletta property deal which saw Marco Gaffarena multiply an investment of some €160,000 tenfold in a few months – the facts suggest a textbook case of insider trading – have been all but forgotten in the wake of much bigger revelations. The Gaffarena story alone would have sunk a government in a properly-functioning EU state; unfortunately, Malta isn’t currently one of them.

Then the Panama Papers came out, suggesting that this was not a government occasionally tainted by corruption but corruption occasionally burdened by the need to govern.

Secret bank accounts were opened before the election victory celebrations were even over. And they would have remained secret were it not for the fortuitous leak of documents from the Panamanian law firm this government’s top people chose to use.

The government has even abused the laws governing the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, set up specifically to combat money laundering. When claims concerning the government’s top officials – Keith Schembri first and foremost – were looked into, the government and its handpicked police commissioner relied on the fact that the FIAU is bound by secrecy.

Another succession of fortuitous leaks helped confirm that the setting up of sketchy financial arrangements was no accident.

The Panama Papers suggested this was not a government occasionally tainted by corruption but corruption occasionally burdened by the need to govern

While further reports exist, the three made public so far already reveal far too much for the Labour Party in its present state to be fit to govern.

After all, two of these reports conclude that there is a “reasonable suspicion of money laundering and/or the existence of proceeds of crime” concerning Schembri, the Prime Minister’s right-hand man. One concerns the transfer of €100,000 in revenue from citizenship scheme applicants from Brian Tonna to Schembri, and the other concerns multiple transactions from Schembri to a British Virgin Islands-based company which has former Allied Group managing director Adrian Hillman as its ultimate beneficiary.

The Prime Minister is aware of this, yet he keeps defending Schembri and insisting that he has done nothing wrong.

The other report focuses on the operations of Pilatus Bank, giving a clear indication why it is the bank of choice for the sketchiest of politicians.

The bank was found to depend heavily on a few politically-exposed persons (PEPs), but conveniently fails to follow the regulations which were designed to prevent them from engaging in suspect financial transactions.

“It appears that there has been a glaring, possibly deliberate disregard of the applicable legislative provisions,” the FIAU says in its report, adding that “the serious deficiencies are compounded by the fact that the bank’s profitability depends to a large extent on a few select clients who are PEPs”.

With news of further reports highlighting questionable transactions around the privatisation of Enemalta and the use of a tanker to store LPG in Delimara, it seems it is now a surprise that every major deal reached by this government appears to be sketchy, including a partnership with ultra-corrupt Azerbaijan, the handing of various state hospitals to a company with no track record owned by a British Virgin Islands-based structure and an ‘American University’ proposed by a construction firm with plenty of experience in property speculation but none in higher education.

It’ll take proper investigations by the police to lead to any successful prosecutions but the FIAU reports are the equivalent of finding crowbar-wielding strangers trying to force their way into your family home.

Faced with a choice, would you wish to bring in the police at this stage or wait until said strangers use their crowbar to threaten grandma into revealing where the valuables are? Unfortunately, that is effectively the choice we face this Saturday.

Karl Camilleri is secretary general of the Democratic Party.