The police ignored findings of a magisterial inquiry for 15 months. They ignored a court filing denouncing a crime by Repubblika. They replied to a legal challenge by Repubblika by insisting that crime is nobody’s business but theirs.

Were it up to Angelo Gafà, we’d have forgotten about Pilatus Bank. That would have been greatly convenient to the operators identified as likely suspects of serious crime by a magisterial inquiry. There’s nothing Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad would like better than avoiding another trial.

It would also have been convenient to the people who banked at Pilatus Bank who want the past forgotten. Of course, as we all know, Pilatus Bank never handled money for Michelle Muscat and Joseph Muscat. We have the word of a junior clerk at the defunct Mossack Fonseca in Panama to reassure us. The clerk has distinctly excellent memory since she was director of some 11,000 companies including a company that was absolutely not in the name of Michelle Muscat. Promise.

Repubblika was never going to let this one go.

We got the public interested. Why, the public started asking, were charges not issued against people that a magistrate said they suspected of serious crimes? Why would the owners of a bank shut down for operating as a laundry for criminal politicians implicitly exonerated by inaction by Malta’s police? Why is someone not trying to right at least part of the wrong Malta has suffered in terms of damage to its international reputation as host country for a den of thieves?

Angelo Gafà today could not avoid press cameras as he walked out of a celebration of Malta having had the boys in blue for two centuries and a bit. Never mind the Bobbies of King Tom, Mr Gafà, you’ve been there for just over two years and for most of that time you ignored an order to charge the owner and directors of Pilatus Bank. Is that going to change?

He said it is today. The police are “at the stage” of issuing international arrest warrants. If only they were about as quick about it as they had been to try to capture the whistleblower who blew open the lid over the crimes at Pilatus Bank.

There’s no fat lady singing so it’s nowhere near time to smoke cigars. But just because Angelo Gafà was forced to do something he clearly didn’t want to do, it’s nice to remember if only for a moment that it’s a good thing to have NGOs and journalists making pests of themselves. Justice, certainly, is served better that way.