Contribution from Victoria

The woman at the forefront of the Panama Papers is dead. She lost her life when a bomb in the car she was driving blew up and sent the vehicle flying into a paddock.

A tranche of 11.5 million documents connected to more than 200,000 offshore accounts make up the Panama Papers and this immense volume of information is still being sifted through and new evidence of money laundering and tax evasion is constantly bubbling to the surface.

Those who stand to be exposed had an incentive for having her silenced.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a journalist who passionately focused on uncovering establishment corruption and her untimely death shows that the corrupt are ruthless and will do anything to keep on the gravy train.

Her son, Matthew Caruana Galizia said, “this was no ordinary murder and it was not tragic” and argued that “when there is blood and fire all around you, that’s war. We are a people at war against the state and organised crime, which have become indistinguishable.”

He added on Facebook. “Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Chris Cardona, Konrad Mizzi, the Attorney General and the long list of police commissioners who took no action: you are complicit. You are responsible for this”.

There is an obvious connection between these words and the Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his closest aids, whose links to offshore companies had been exposed.

There is also a global dimension to this, as the exposures Galizia worked on involved the who’s who list of multinational corporations and political leaders. Even the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been named as one of them.

It makes perfect sense to allege that there is a war going on between the people in general and the greed of a small and exclusive group, amassing fortunes at the expense of everyone else.  A war that is becoming more open and brutal.

Rights of citizens are being trampled

One of the Maltese police officers who is supposed to be investigating the murder, a sergeant called Ramon Misfsud, wrote about it on his own Facebook account: “Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung! Feeling happy”. There is not going to be much of an investigation form this quarter.

Although the sergeant has been suspended, this is not a great deal under the circumstances,  and it suggests that power structures provide impunity to wrongdoers, encourage corruption and punish those who make a stand against it.

This is why it is so important that other carry on the work of Daphne Caruana Galizia.