Care to explain, Mr Kessler?

For starters, it would seem that the "unambiguous, circumstantial" evidence that led to Dalli's resignation last October, is not so altogether "unambiguous" after all.

Indeed, it doesn't even look much like "evidence". It is, however, "circumstantial": on that, at least, we can all safely agree.

Exactly how "circumstantial evidence" managed to precipitate such a high level resignation in the first place - when the very definition of the word implies that more reliable evidence would have been required to secure a conviction at law - is a question that only Mr Giovanni Kessler (of Europe's anti-fraud agency OLAF) can answer.

I for one think that Mr Kessler now owes Malta a thorough and very detailed explanation for the incalculable harm he has inflicted on our international reputation. But in case he finds it difficult to answer questions put to him by people who were born and raised beneath the 'boot' of Italy: i.e., the people known fondly as 'terroni' by many Northern Italians (especially in the region of Alto Adige, or so I am told), and who are therefore viewed as 'da schiacciare sottopiede' - there are a few other questions the rest of you may wish to ponder.

First, let us go back in time to last October. When rumours of Dalli's imminent resignation first surfaced, I'll admit that my initial reaction was not exactly 'surprise'. A number of possible scenarios immediately presented themselves. I myself imagined that the 'serious scandal' in which he had apparently been caught up would have had something to do with his many (and, let's face it, rather arcane) business interests in Libya before the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

There were other possibilities also... for Dalli is something of an institution unto himself, and spans a good two decades of local and international controversy. As I recall, the news throughout the 1990s was practically all about Dalli - there was even a joke that went something like 'Dalli Daily'':  Certainly, Alfred Sant had built his entire career as Opposition leader on the back of Dalli corruption allegations. There was the sale of Mid Med Bank, the Daewoo affair, and later allegations of kickbacks on hospital equipment tenders.  There was also talk of irregular procurement of airline tickets through a family travel agency; and much murkier allegations concerning an Iranian shipping line.

Most of those allegations would eventually prove groundless. In the case of the Mater Dei allegations, Dalli had actually been framed; the report itself was a fabrication, and its author a crook.

Still, I was not one of the many who defended John Dalli back then. There were simply too many rumours to simply exclude the possibility that any or all may have contained an iota of truth.

The irony, of course, is that the selfsame people who would later take visible pleasure in Dalli's downfall last October, were themselves the ones who defended him when he was targeted (day in, day out) by Super One Television. But we all know the unbridled hypocrisy that goes into political journalism in Malta, so let's just drop it and move on.

In any case: when we all heard that Dalli was about to resign, my mind immediately turned to any or all of the above scenarios. But I must say that Silvio Zammit - and his attempts to make the tobacco industry part with €60 million of its easily-earned cash, in exchange for... um... nothing at all - did not feature in any of those scenarios.

Why not? Let's just say that I have heard Dalli described as many things in my time - but 'stupid' was never one of them. That a man of Dalli's intelligence would have been 'in' on such a farcically doomed attempt to bribe a Swedish tobacco firm, at a time when it was already way too late in the day to influence legislation, is patently ridiculous. Even if you allowed for the possibility that... yes, even intelligent people can make incredibly stupid mistakes... well, the allegations didn't even make sense.

OK, I shall assume that the precise circumstances under which Dalli resigned are by now well enough known to all and sundry. I shall also assume that most of you know (and if not, you're about to find out) that the Malta Police have been in possession of the OLAF report that contains the abovementioned "unambiguous, circumstantial evidence" for several months.

Time enough, one would assume, to read the report, and draw their own conclusions about its contents. And in fact they did precisely that, and concluded there was enough evidence to press criminal charges against Silvio Zammit... but significantly, not against Dalli himself.

Zammit, by the way, is a former Dalli canvasser in the 10th district, who also busies himself organizing regular circuses and the occasional freak show. Before this whole scandal erupted he was last seen dragging a bunch of harmless little animal rights activists (translation: 15-year-old girls wearing 'peace and love' T-shirts) to court for the grave crime of having described him (quite aptly, all things considered) as a "clown".

The main witness in that case is Gayle Kimberley: a young lawyer who appears to have suddenly found herself way, way, WAY out of her depth... and that's all I will comment about her for the time being.

In any case: given the background to all this, I for one expected charges to also be pressed against the former European Commissioner himself. After all, wasn't the OLAF report supposed to contain "unambiguous evidence" that he was involved in the bribe?

Well, I need hardly add that no such charges have since been forthcoming. And faced with this anti-climax, I found myself wondering - and I'm sure I'm not alone in this - about the curious anomaly that was suddenly staring us all in the face.

Excuse me, but... if the evidence in that report was so very compelling that Barroso himself gave Dalli around 45 minutes to clear out of the Commission in disgrace... why was the same evidence not enough to secure a criminal prosecution (still less a conviction)?

Naturally I can't answer the question, because I haven't read the report myself. Nor has anyone else as far as we know: apart from Mr Kessler, Mr Barroso, and the local authorities including (but not limited to) the local police's economic crimes unit.

And again this raises a question that several MEPs have been asking since around Christmas. Why all this secrecy, anyway? In what way would publishing the report jeopardize the case against Dalli when... a) there isn't a case against Dalli to jeopardize, and b) we've already heard excerpts of this report, and therefore know that it does not really add up to an indictment of the former foreign minister anyway?

Well, the latest revelations are beginning to shed light on this particular mystery. We now know - or at least have very good reason to suspect - that OLAF does not want to publish the report, because it would only illustrate to all and sundry how very flimsy the allegations against Dalli have all along been.

We know, for instance, that Gayle Kimberley was 'economical with the truth' about at least one of the two meetings she claimed to have had with Dalli. Much more damningly, we also know that OLAF knew this, too... and incredibly, it allegedly urged a witness - Johan Gabrielsson, Swedish Match's public affairs director - to stick to that flawed version of events, even though it was grossly misleading.

This in turn raises a couple of other small questions for Mr Kessler. Is perjury not a crime in Brussels? Is fabricating false 'evidence', or encouraging others to break the law, not illegal either?

But let us return briefly to the evidence against Dalli. One thing has at least been clear from the start: Zammit tried to extract a large - ridiculously large - amount of money from Swedish Match; this much has been established as a fact. But that same fact can only be cited as evidence of wrongdoing by Dalli himself, if it can also be demonstrated that the Commissioner knew of the bribe, and either approved of it, abetted it, or - at minimum - failed to report it.

Meanwhile there are reliable indications that the basis for the accusations leveled at Dalli took the form of a number of registered phone-calls between the Commissioner and his former Sliema canvasser, who now faces charges over trading in influence.

Were these phone-calls the 'unambiguous' evidence cited by Kessler? If so, it seems pretty damn ambiguous to me.

For one thing I don't know what words were exchanged between Dalli and Zammit; but then again - unless the separate allegation of wiretapping (hotly denied by OLAF) is also true - neither does Kessler. So what made him so certain that the subject of discussion was Zammit's use of Dalli's name to extract improbable amounts of cash... in return for absolute bugger all?

Because this is ultimately the huge flaw in OLAF's thesis. Dalli was supposed to know that Zammit had asked for €60 million in order to broker a meeting with the Commission, and possibly influence the draft tobacco directive. Small snag: the tobacco directive was already done and dusted at the time these allegations emerged, and... oh look, the law did not favour the Swedish tobacco lobby at all.

And this is just one of the reasons I never quite saw the sense in Kessler's version of events. Why on earth would Dalli consent to such a baldly stupid bribery attempt to be made in his name, if he had no intention of actually meeting the lobbyists' demands?

The only explanation I can think of (straight out of an old Mafia movie a la 'Bugsy Malone', come to think of it) is that John Dalli all along intended to double-cross Swedish Match: leading them to believe that he intended to change the law to their advantage... when in fact he had no such intention at all.

Besides: I find it extremely hard to believe that Swedish Match would pay so much money just for a chance to get to meet Dalli (with no guarantee of an agreement to the bargain)... when the opportunity to meet the Commissioner had existed all along anyway, and for absolutely free. (Commissioners meet lobbyists all the time - heck, Dalli's replacement even appointed a tobacco lobbyist onto the Commission's ethics board, and nobody called for his resignation).

So whichever way you look at this story, OLAF's version is so full of holes you could almost use it to strain pasta.

And that's before we even pause to consider what Kessler did NOT know, when he simply assumed that a Commissioner from Malta must perforce live up to that tired old stereotype of 'greasy, swarthy and corrupt little Mediterranean politician' (which, let's face it, remains the likeliest explanation for the zeal and dishonesty with which the same Kessler seems to have engineered Dalli's hasty exit last October).

Kessler was probably unaware that John Dalli may have harboured ambitions to return to the local political scene, once his stint as Commissioner was duly over - as indeed was very likely, considering that Dalli had formerly described himself as a 'father confessor' figure to disgruntled Nationalist MPs, and did not exactly make a secret of his own leadership ambitions.

For the same reason it is by no means improbable that Dalli may also have had an interest in finding out as much as he could about the goings-on in his own country - and if so, what better person to touch base with, than his own former henchman on one of his own former constituencies?

I mean seriously: did the possibility that Zammit and Dalli may have had other things than just 'snus' to discuss that not even remotely occur to Kessler at all? And is this the seriousness of the agency that the European Union relies upon to weed out serious cases of fraud?

Hate to say this, but it's beginning to look more like the Keystone Cops to me; and if the implications for Malta weren't so utterly dreadful, the entire charade would be downright comical.

Which reminds me: an explanation, please, Mr Kessler. Under such woefully ambiguous circumstances, I do not think that is very much to ask.