Corrupt Zammit police officers rewarded for leaving the force

Corrupt Inspector Daniel Zammit was bought out of the police force rather than kicked out and prosecuted.

Corrupt inspector Roderick Zammit, who set up in business and formed a company with Joe Gaffarena while his brother was prosecuting Gaffarena’s son-in-law for murder. This inspector too is fixing to follow his corrupt brother and father out of the force with a plum position.

Corrupt deputy commissioner and former acting Commissioner of Police Ray Zammit was bought out of the police force within weeks of his son – again, instead of being kicked out and prosecuted.

Instead of being thoroughly investigated, kicked out of the police force, stripped of their police pension rights and then prosecuted, the corrupt Zammit police officers – deputy police commissioner Ray Zammit, who until last December was acting Commissioner of Police, and his sons Daniel and Roderick, both inspectors – are being rewarded for agreeing to leave the force.

As long as their cousin and chum Manuel Mallia was Minister for Police, and his puppet Peter Paul Zammit was his handpicked Commissioner of Police, they were protected and could behave with impunity. Then Mallia made his corrupt cousin Ray acting Commissioner of Police, and the situation became even more comfortable. Inspector Daniel Zammit – an officer with the Fraud Squad – became completely indiscreet about his flashy cars and other acquisitions, and his father was seen driving a Mercedes.

Then came the night last December when Manuel Mallia’s driver, tanked up on Red Bull, drove after a private citizen and shot at him while babysitting Mallia’s 4-year-old daughter. And the whole country heard the laconic manner in which Ray Zammit responded to the news that one of his police constables, who was also the Police Minister’s driver, had discharged his weapon on a public road in the direction of a private citizen.

Mallia’s career as a cabinet minister was over, and so was Ray Zammit’s stint as acting Commissioner of Police. He reverted to his former post of deputy police commissioner, but it is now clear that since then there has been a plan of action to buy them out of the police force rather than making them pay for their corruption and wrong-doing while in it.

Five weeks ago, the Justice Minister – not the Police Minister – announced that Ray Zammit had left the police force to take up the post of chief of a new agency set up to “put an end to abusive practices by wardens” (plenty of scope for corruption there).

No name, contact details or other information about this agency were given to the press. It is clearly a playpen created specifically for Ray Zammit, to buy him out of the police force. The press did not, at that stage, ask for details of his salary and conditions. At this stage, we most definitely should.

Just before that, unknown to the press and the public, Ray Zammit’s corrupt son, Inspector Daniel Zammit, had also been bought out of the police force: given a police pension after being ‘boarded out’ on medical grounds at 35 when he spends his evenings lifting 100kg weights at the Ta’ Qali gymn, and within five days put on the payroll with a salary of 60,000 euros at Enemalta Corporation, as a consultant in its theft and fraud office.

I am very reliably informed that procedures were underway to have Inspector Daniel Zammit’s corrupt brother, Inspector Roderick Zammit, bought out of the police force by similar means “but the exposure in the press and in parliament put paid to that, for now at least”.

If anybody has a clearer photograph of Roderick Zammit, please send it in. I also need a photograph of Joe Gaffarena, and of his daughter and her husband Stephen Caruana who murdered her lover. It isn’t quite right that the photographs of all the other protagonists in this corrupt saga are in the media but theirs are not.