The Commissioner of Police is set to resign

The Malta Independent reported an hour ago that the Commissioner of Police is set to resign, and that he has taken long leave of absence from work for “health reasons”. After travelling for a while with his wife, the newspaper reports, he was admitted to hospital suffering from chest pains.

Michael Cassar is currently under a great deal of pressure from an angry public demanding to know why he has taken no action over the involvement of a cabinet minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff in the Panama Papers, preferring to order a magistrate’s inquiry into the scandalous matter of the Opposition Leader’s fuel gauge instead.

Rumours are spreading fast as to the reason for his desire to step down, but I’m not one to believe rumours (there have been so many about me), and I would think that the real reason is something I wrote about a while back when Panamagate first broke: Michael Cassar’s attitude, at his stage in life, would probably be that he doesn’t need the hassle of a major investigation into members of the government. That is the kind of thing you take on, I wrote, when you are raring to go and have the zeal and tenacity of somebody who is at the midpoint of his policing career and not at the end of it.

It’s all going to pieces under Joseph Muscat’s corrupt administration. Cassar will be the fourth Commissioner of Police to be removed or to step down since March 2013: John Rizzo (removed by Police Minister Manuel Mallia to save John Dalli from prosecution), Peter Paul Zammit (a puppet who couldn’t take the heat), Ray Zammit (a corrupt man edged sideways into another, comfier position in the wake of a spate of scandals involving his two corrupt police officer sons, his cousin the Police Minister and his trigger-happy chauffeur), and now, Michael Cassar.