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One of the most disturbing things about the collapse of the rule of law in Malta is the fact that calls for the resignations of both the attorney general and the police commissioner have become as commonplace as your local pastizzeria.
On Monday, we heard renewed calls for the resignation of attorney general Victoria Buttigieg because her office failed to adequately quantify which of alleged murder mastermind Yorgen Fenech’s assets were to remain frozen, leading to the lifting of a freezing order issued in 2019.
After the press went all in with stories about the police force’s catastrophic raids, we also heard the umpteenth call for police commissioner Angelo Gafa’s resignation.
How did we get to this point? How did the government effectively neutralise two of the most important law enforcement bodies in the country?
In theory, both offices are meant to be entirely autonomous. Both are responsible for the state’s efforts to investigate and prosecute criminal activity of the worst order, and the law provides them wide discretionary powers when doing so. Buttigieg and Gafa’ are supposed to represent the very top branches of the long arm of the law, and yet the law’s arms have never seemed stubbier.
Though it is evident that both Buttigieg and Gafa’ have stood idly by at their post while the Labour Party pillages the country’s coffers, they would not have been able to survive at their post for this long without their predecessors having already lowered the bar for them.
In fact, we can trace the decline of both offices back to the early days of disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s government, with two individuals in particular playing a key role in the process of defanging these two institutions: former attorney general Peter Grech and former police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar.
In a two-part series of articles about the decline of law enforcement in Malta, we will first start by looking at the recent history of the office of the police commissioner. I will publish the second piece focusing on the office of the attorney general tomorrow morning.
A rabbit cookout and an expensive villa
Former police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar. Photo: DOI
Daphne Caruana Galizia had immediately raised public awareness about Lawrence Cutajar’s fawning support for the Labour Party shortly after he was appointed acting police commissioner in March 2014.
In August 2013, a mere few months after Muscat’s inglorious ascent to power, Cutajar posted on Facebook to tell the world how happy he was that the prime minister was threatening to deport asylum seekers without allowing them to apply for refugee status (this coming from a senior police officer who was an assistant commissioner within the immigration department just before then).
By 2016, Cutajar’s temporary status as police commissioner was made permanent, a decision which would prove invaluable to the government’s relentless assault on democracy and its safeguards.
That very same year, Cutajar failed his first major credibility test as police commissioner by refusing to investigate the Panama Papers leak. Three days after Daphne was murdered, Cutajar gave that infamously disastrous press conference flanked by then deputy police commissioner and Yorgen Fenech’s bosom buddy, Silvio Valletta.
As the entire country looked to the authorities for answers in its total state of shock, Cutajar and Valletta fumbled one question after the other, failing to provide basic information while claiming that they did not wish to compromise the magisterial inquiry. This line of defence – as untrue as it is, since nobody can tell the police commissioner what to investigate and when – would become particularly important anytime the police force failed to look into glaringly obvious instances of corruption.
And of course, one cannot mention Cutajar without pointing out that, a few months before Daphne was killed, the police had failed to investigate the now-shuttered Pilatus Bank, with the police commissioner busying himself with enjoying a rabbit cookout while the former owner of the bank left the country in the dead of the night.
What first appeared to be total and utter incompetence took a far more sinister turn when Cutajar’s name was mentioned by Melvin Theuma in connection with Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder. Theuma, who had confessed to his role as middleman, had alleged that both Cutajar and Valletta had tipped off individuals connected with the murder (including Theuma himself). Cutajar was later placed under formal investigation on a magistrate’s orders.
Following Theuma’s allegations, Cutajar, who was forced to resign just four days after prime minister Robert Abela took over from his disgraced predecessor, was suspended from a consultancy role he was gifted by the government on the same day.
After a brief interlude of acting commissioners, Angelo Gafa’ enters the scene.
Police commissioner Angelo Gafa’. Photo: Malta Police Force Facebook page
Though Gafa’ was always far keener than Cutajar in terms of wanting to come across as a media-savvy commissioner who sounds and looks just about right, it is now clear that he was just another Trojan horse whose career was furthered solely because the government wanted him to take over from Cutajar.
In 2021, less than a year after Gafa’ took over, I had interviewed a highly decorated veteran of the police force, Raymond D’Anastas. I had reached out to him because I got to know he was one of the officers whose rightful place in the upper echelons of the force was taken from them so Cutajar could promote his dubious cronies instead. When I asked him about whether he thought the new leadership would change things for the better, his answer was an emphatic ‘no’.
As it turned out, D’Anastas’ assessment would prove to be correct.
A year later, I published the story about the police commissioner’s villa in Marsaxlokk after I was informed that, together with his wife, Gafa’ had taken out a massive €612,000 loan to finance the purchase (a figure that clambers up to a total repayment of €798,216 when factoring in interest rates).
The real question at the time was not about whether the commissioner and his wife, who is also a senior police inspector in charge of a unit which was set up under Gafa’s command, bought a property which was far out of their reach. On paper, the Gafas made enough money to finance the purchase and still have enough left over to live comfortably.
The question was: how will they continue to afford such a loan if they were to no longer serve in high-ranking positions with so many perks and allowances? Did this property make the police commissioner beholden to his job and the powerful political interests which could unseat him if he proved to be an inconvenience?
Over the past two years, Gafa’s appearances in press conferences and interviews have dwindled. When he does resurface, he never fails to stress his claim that trust in the police force has improved under his tenure, rattling off long lists of numbers from surveys gauging public sentiment to substantiate his argument. He has strenuously argued that he does not shy away from pushing back against corruption and has even accused anti-corruption NGOs like Repubblika of ‘intimidating‘ him whenever they called him out for the lack of high-profile corruption prosecutions.
The truth is that, beyond the official surveys he seems to be so fond of, there is hardly any real enthusiasm for Gafa’s track record. This was made all the more evident with how the entire country responded to our exclusive story confirming his reappointment as commissioner earlier this year.
The sheer outrage at the government’s unquestioning reappointment of Gafa’ as police commissioner only intensified following The Shift News’ story about how his renewed employment contract effectively doubled his already sizeable income.
At any rate, one can rest assured that Gafa’ and his creditors won’t have to worry about foreclosing on that villa anytime soon.