We have to examine a new angle to this corruption web

In the light of what is now emerging, day after day, about Police Inspector Daniel Zammit’s extensive network of corrupt contacts and shareholding in Paceville operators and internet gambling, among other business interests, we have to consider the possibility that he has not been acting for himself but is a front for his father’s cousin Manuel Mallia.

With the volume of information now coming out into the open as people join the dots and one story leads to another, I for one can no longer believe that these people sought out Daniel Zammit only because they needed a corrupt police inspector on their side.

Zammit strikes me as being not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, more of a useful tool than anything else, and beyond that, his reckless, indiscreet and flashy behaviour makes him a liability as the current situation proves. He is, in fact, exactly the sort of person that Manuel Mallia, a poor judge of character with an elastic understanding of boundaries and a preference for human tools, would choose. Daniel Zammit is precisely in the mould of Mallia’s driver, Paul Sheehan, another policeman.

When you bring all the loose ends together, it is perfectly plausible that Zammit has been fronting for criminal defence lawyer, Labour MP and disgraced former Police Minister Manuel Mallia, who has a large network of associates, cronies and clients in the Paceville world that predates his entry into politics and continued thereafter. Manuel Mallia and his then girlfriend Codruta Cristian were even godparents at the baptism of a baby born to Paceville underworld boss Darren Grima and a Romanian nude dancer at one of the Paceville clubs.

Zammit is the perfect ‘person of trust’ for Mallia because not only is he a blood relation but his father, Ray Zammit, is very obviously thoroughly enmeshed with Mallia as the public shoot-out last autumn revealed only too well. Mallia had appointed him acting Commissioner of Police only a few months before that.

We all laughed at those leaked telephone conversations recorded on the night of the shooting, but they were no laughing matter at all. They pointed to really serious corruption and abuse.

And we still haven’t got to the bottom of the reasons for the car chase and shooting, or how Stephen Smith, who was shot at by Mallia’s driver – and whose business lawyer was Manuel Mallia – was involved.

If Daniel Zammit is fronting for Manuel Mallia, that would explain the prime minister’s reluctance to hold an inquiry, his failure to make even a proper statement on this very serious matter, and the problems the Commissioner of Police now faces in ordering an investigation into the Zammits’ business interests, their conduct and connections.

If there is a police investigation into these corrupt police officers, followed by a prosecution, the nature of their relationship with Manuel Mallia will be forced into the open.

What we are seeing here is institutions designed to protect the citizen against abuse being corrupted instead at every level, by an enmeshed web of interests in which everyone involved has a stake in no action being taken while criminal behaviour carries on unabated.

Manuel Mallia’s political colleagues, even if they are not involved, will have no interest in having him investigated and possibly prosecuted for his links to the Zammits and the Paceville underworld, because the public will see the Labour Party as tainted by association, and anything that weakens the Labour Party also weakens their grasp on the government, and their status and position at the public trough.