Consultant to the Director of Public Prosecutions Kulandra Ratneser's statement that the Terrence Smith prosecution is likely to be his last should be greeted with regret.

Since becoming Acting Director of Public Prosecutions, the veteran lawyer has had a high degree of success in high profile cases, and did a great deal to strengthen the Crown's reputation for upholding law and order.

Still, since he came out of semi-retirement to take the job and then continued as a consultant to see through a number of cases, including the Bermuda Housing Corporation prosecution, it is understandable that he would now like a quieter life.

Nonetheless, just because it is likely that he is stepping down is no reason that efforts should not be made to continue his legacy of tough but fair prosecuting.

And there would be no better place to start than with his calls for modernisation of the Island's corruption laws, which are nearly a century old.

When the wide ranging Bermuda Housing Corporation investigation was closed, Mr. Ratneser said that both he and the Police were hamstrung by the outmoded laws on which the onus is placed on the prosecution to prove corruption.

Normally in criminal law the burden of proof is rightly placed on the prosecution, which must show how the suspect is guilty. Indeed, as every schoolboy knows, Anglo-American law is based on the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty.

Nonetheless, there are certain crimes that are extremely difficult to prove, and corruption falls into that area, largely because there is no "victim" as both the corruptor and the "corruptee" are guilty of crimes and unlikely to confess.

That is why, as Mr. Ratneser said this week, modern corruption laws holds that public servants involved in a contract who receive some form of financial assistance from the contractor are determined to have accepted that corruptly.

He said: "This throws the burden of innocence over the transaction on the recipient of that money to prove that it was not received corruptly. It's not only the public servant who would be guilty but also the person who gave the money to the public servant."

Mr. Ratneser was careful to say that in the BHC investigation "there was no evidence in this case of any crime as we know it in Bermuda". But he added that if the law was different, further investigations would have been done.

On that basis, Bermuda will never know for sure if the extent of corruption in the BHC started and ended with Mr. Smith and the witnesses who came forward in the case.

It is quite possible that Mr. Smith was operating on his own, but the limitations of the law mean that this will forever be an open question.

That uncertainty is bad for the integrity of the Government and potentially leaves all kinds of people who may well be completely innocent open to innuendo.

When Premier Alex Scott released the BHC report in 2004, he promised that recommendations for reform of the corruption laws would be forthcoming. But so far, nothing has happened. That's not good enough and this is an issue — along with whistleblower protection legislation — that needs to be acted upon quickly.