Organised crime is globalised and within the European context exploits freedoms of movement of people and money. Criminals benefit from the combination of the integration of the European market and the fragmentation of its policing and justice.
The current structures of cooperation depend on the goodwill and cooperation of local forces. Certainly, in the case of the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, this was not always
forthcoming. Europol’s former executive director lamented in diplomatic language that cooperation of Malta’s police with Europol had “some room for improvement”.19
This must be seen in the context of the subsequent discovery that top officials of Malta’s police had direct relationships with suspects.
The Italian press20 reported that for years prior to his arrest in Malta, Italian police sought to notify Yorgen Fenech of an investigation into match-fixing he is believed to have been part of. All notifications, however, were not served because the Maltese police would return correspondence addressed to Yorgen Fenech as his address was ‘not known’.
Malta licences more than 25 international banks processing billions of euro. It issues thousands of passports to third-country nationals that do not live and barely visit the country. It hosts a large portion of Europe’s gaming industry. The potential victims of crimes using these tools are often outside of Malta.
We would argue that to keep up with federalised crime, European law enforcement and criminal justice should also be federalised. Cross-border crime should be defined as federal, empowering federal police to investigate, if necessary without reference to local authorities and charged in front of federal courts.
We do not underestimate the political complexity of such a proposal but lack of political imagination rolls out the red carpet for sophisticated crime, particularly financial crime.