When crime does pay

"When pay time is approaching, I see him there daily. From 6:00am his car will be parked in front of my house, and he watches, just watches and makes his presence felt. When I go out with Jamie he just gazes at him. He's just three years old, but realises that the man is watching him. I tell him he is a crazy man but is harmless; he just looks at people and does nothing. Which is true mind you, he just looks. However that's because I pay him a hefty sum each month. I've already paid him three times as much as the original sum he lent me..."

The above is the chilling account of a young mother who fell victim to usury, reproduced on a blog by a volunteer who helps people in similar circumstances.

Unfortunately it is by no means a unique or even unusual experience. Indeed the number of people understood to be living in similar or identical circumstances is believed to be quite high: high enough to merit the establishment of a 'Foundation for the Victims of Usury', operated under the auspices of Caritas.

Like many other underground realities, usury tends to only manifest itself in sporadic bursts of violence. Details emerging from the compilation of evidence against Jason Galea - charged with the murders of Mario Camilleri, aka l-Imniehru, his son (also named Mario Camilleri) and, separately, Matthew Zahra - suggest that among the possible motives for at least one of those murders (that of Zahra, who had been reported missing for a whole year) concerned usury.

According to the prosecution, Zahra was murdered over an astronomical debt of €500,000 - when the original sum loaned was only €6,000. If the prosecution's thesis proves to be correct, this will hardly be the first time that the crime of lending money against exorbitant interest has resulted directly in violent murder.

Two years ago, another murder - that of Anthony Borg, aka il-Bona - was likewise attributed to usury. Taken together, these cases appear to illustrate an old truism: when the authorities fail to deal with crime, the ordinary citizen will eventually take the law into his own hands.

And yet, 'dealing with crime' is easier said than done. Usury is technically a crime, but - like 'living off the earnings of prostitution' - it remains notoriously difficult to prove, partly because the victims, as a rule, will be too terrified to testify against their debtors.

Furthermore, as domestic violence cases so often illustrate, it is difficult to prove 'threats of violence', even in the rare instances that these are actually reported. What happens as a result of this state of affairs is that such threats only come to the attention of the authorities when they are already translated into action... in which case it will be too late in the day.

Another, more sinister reason for the difficulty in pinning down this crime is provided by Fr John Avellino, who heads the above-mentioned charity. It would appear that loan sharks often make use of legitimate services provided by notaries, who draw up contracts in which (wittingly or unwittingly) the actual interest charged on loans is hidden from view through legal mechanisms that are too complicated to go into here.

At a glance this suggests active complicity by members of the notarial profession; but appearances can be deceiving. (In many cases the notary can quite easily be misled, often by the perpetrator of the crime, into thinking that the contract is legitimate.)

Such considerations illustrate precisely why the scourge of usury is so very difficult to address. But at the same time, failure to control what appears to be a widespread practice can have serious repercussions, as the recent murders of both Matthew Zahra and Anthony Borg amply illustrate.

Clearly, this is not an issue that can be swept under the carpet indefinitely. What is needed with urgency is therefore the formulation of a national strategy to tackle the problem; and while there is obviously no magic-wand solution, a number of steps can and should be taken as a matter of urgency.

The first and most crucial step involves amending the Criminal Code so that it reflects the severity of the crime. Incredibly, Maltese usury law stipulates a prison term of not more than 18 months and payment of a fine between €2,300 and €35,000. Given the sheer sums of money involved in such transactions, these penalties can hardly be described as a deterrent.

But punitive measures alone are unlikely to have much of an effect, unless the demand side of the equation is also addressed. This would entail tackling head-on the growing phenomenon of poverty - a reality which can simply no longer be ignored, even if no immediate solutions appear to be in sight.

From this perspective, perhaps it would make sense to heed the repeated calls of such NGOs as the Alliance Against Poverty: namely to hold a national forum, possibly under the auspices of the President, to at least begin discussion of possible approaches to this burgeoning national problem.