Professor  Kevin Aquilina’s article ‘What’s so special about the Special Prosecutor’ was delayed by the temporary suspension of updates to this e-journal.  In the meantime, the world obviously kept on turning and events kept happening, amongst them the civil uprising in Tunisia. By sheer coincidence, minutes after I re-read Prof Aquilina’s article with a view to posting it online, I came across an article on Reuters stating Tunisian economy to be purged:

‘Tunisia's economy will be purged legally of the grip of overthrown president Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali's extended family, and is well placed to flourish, a leading Tunisian economist said on Monday.

Moncef Cheikhrouhou, forced to sell his shares in a family press group to a relative of the president and go into exile in 2000, said a commission created by the Justice Ministry would unravel assets acquired through nepotism and corruption.

"They behaved like a mafia that reaped money from all sectors of the Tunisian economy," Cheikhrouhou told Reuters in an interview in Paris, where he teaches international finance at the HEC business school.

"For example, all car imports had to be controlled by the family. Tunisians who wanted to import new brands either had to give a majority stake to a member of the family without paying, or hand over a rake-off on the profits," he said.

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The World Bank estimated Tunisia's growth rate could be raised two or three percentage points from 4 percent a year to India's level if corruption and nepotism were removed, he said.

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Many foreign firms that did business in Tunisia were forced to enter into partnership with relatives of Ben Ali and his wife Leila's Trabelsi family, which would now have to be unwound.

"We are trying to make sure that the rule of law prevails in Tunisia," he said. "I expect this commission will receive an enormous number of demands for compensation...’

I am not suggesting that anything of the sort is going on in Malta, or that the local situation is in any way comparable with that in Tunisia. On the other hand, the detrimental costs of corruption are widely known (look at literature on sites such as GRECO for more on this subject) and could ultimately prove fatal to governments: Tunisia, hoping to make a new start, seems to acknowledge this and seems to be determined to tackle the problem seriously. I am not doubting the intentions of the Maltese legislator, either. It is in fact precisely because I believe in the Maltese legislator’s good intentions that I am urging a serious consideration of Prof Aquilina’s proposals.