Essentially, he planned to ignore the science unless he was paid to do otherwise. Sixty million is a percentage of what the snus market would be worth if the tobacco directive were lifted.

We don’t know exactly how much Dalli expected to make from “helping the poor in Africa”. He said he did the work for free, meaning he didn’t charge any fees.

He hadn’t said that he never expected to be paid, directly or indirectly, in any form or manner, in cash or in kind, in his name or in that of a proxy, a brokerage fee on transactions worth billions.

We know they were to be worth billions because Dalli told us so himself, contradicting New York Times reports that he was being investigated for transfers worth ‘only’ millions.

By Dalli’s own reckoning, whatever he expected to earn from those millions reported by the New York Times was at least a thousand times more.

Brokerage fees are calculated as a percentage value of a transaction. A percentage of billions is considerably higher than a percentage of millions.

You can’t accuse Dalli of being profligate with money, so what on earth is he doing all that for?

Does one need to be a policeman to get the whole thing arse about face?

‘But the Bahamas triangle has come full circle. He is corrupt, anyway,’ he heard himself saying.

‘After all, why did he not condemn Silvio Zammit? Yes, why not!’

It was a eureka moment for the dilapidated euro-fraud buster. The ultimate piece of unambiguous circumstantial evidence that sealed his case forever.

It was not easy. But better than having to investigate the tobacco cartel.

This reads too much like, i’m involved but you cannot prove it.

Someone totally external to the facts would have said ‘I am innocent’.

But there again different people have different ways of expressing themselves, probably.