Consider this hypothetical situation. A small group of criminals find themselves with the power to set up a bank for the sole purpose of money laundering, and they are able to keep it running, regardless, due to institutional meltdown.

They channel their ill-gotten gains through this bank — from, say, passport sales, to backhanders from Azerbaijan (for fuel purchases perhaps?); to possible kickbacks for so many other multi-billion euro contracts (in the local context, the power station deal?, Vitals Global?, Electrogas?) they have signed behind closed doors.

They use offshore nominee companies to channel money through the bank and pass it on to other offshore companies, so as to put any possible investigators off the scent.

They even manage to get themselves some extremely wealthy but known to be corrupt overseas clients to make use of their ‘services’. It’s all very lucrative, and totally independent of brand Malta.

If one is able to keep something like this running for another 5 years (it would seem that the activities did not start that long ago, possibly because it took some time to set things up just right), those concerned will have made untold wealth and be able to disappear into the sunset and never look back. But they will have left Malta in the state it was in 1987 — or worse.

But do they care? It would seem not.

This is why we need, so desperately, to get rid of Muscat and his henchmen!