And as usual, we are not going to find out who they’re working for

A Malta Freeport employee and a Malta Customs official were arraigned in the Courts of Justice today, accused of having smuggled 10.5 million cigarettes into Malta and evading €2.2 million of customs & excise duty on them.

All well and good, but it strikes me that a lowly Freeport employee and a Customs official are not going to be the smugglers themselves but the fixers for a smuggling ring.

Cigarette smuggling in Malta, and through and by Malta, is highly organised and has been taking place for years. They smuggle legal cigarettes and fake cigarettes made in China. I know for a fact that a team of private investigators, commissioned by one of the tobacco giants, was in Malta around five or six years ago making their enquiries on the ground.

But as with illegal drugs, the police always catch the small-time dealers, the fixers, the cogs in the wheel, the mules, and never the traffickers or the operatives in smuggling rings.

Who was the only big-time trafficker to be caught, tried, found guilty and spend time in a Maltese prison? Meinrad Calleja, with his 15-year sentence, and he was caught almost by chance when he had been at it for years and years, and not just in Malta. He thought he was safe and protected, zipping in and out of the VIP lounge at the airport, because his father was commanding officer of the Maltese army.

That was 20 years ago. That’s right: the last time the Malta police nabbed an actual trafficker, rather than just a small-time dealer of fixer, was two decades ago. I suppose the police were grateful when they all began killing each other or commissioning each other’s murder some four years ago.