Nine years have passed since Malta’s pre-eminent investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed by a car bomb near her home, said Jurgen Balzan in Newsbook Malta. The three men who carried out the assassination are now behind bars, and this month, after a tortuous nine-year investigation and a dramatic two-month trial, the man accused of commissioning the murder finally looked set to pay for his alleged crime.
The Maltese millionaire Yorgen Fenech, a close friend of the chief of staff of Malta’s then-prime minister, Joseph Muscat, had admitted, in a police interrogation, that he had given €50,000 to the middleman who’d recruited the killers. So it came as a tremendous shock to the people of Malta that, despite this and other damning bits of evidence, the jury last week acquitted him.
What’s happened in Malta is a “hammer blow to justice, press freedom and the EU”, said The Observer. Given that Fenech’s confession was “never seriously rebutted” at the trial, it’s absurd for the jurors to have cleared him of conspiracy to murder, by a margin of eight votes to one. The rule of law in the EU’s smallest member state is “hanging by a thread”.
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It’s extraordinary what a seismic transformation this small island nation of 550,000 people has undergone since Malta’s Labour Party came to power in 2013, nine years after the former British colony joined the EU, said Ben Munster on Politico (Brussels). Since then it has achieved an “astonishing economic boom, fuelled by a no-holds-barred drive to court the world’s wealthy”. Between 2013 and 2024, Malta’s stock of foreign direct investment ballooned from €9.6 billion to €460 billion; its GDP increased by 70%. But all that gold has brought with it deep corruption and moral decay.
And that was what made Caruana Galizia’s fearless reporting so essential, said Joanna Demarco on the Global Investigative Journalism Network (Washington DC). She delved, like nobody else, into the “eyebrow-raising schemes” of Muscat, the PM who resigned in 2020 as a result of the political upheaval sparked by her assassination. At the time of her death, she was investigating allegations of high-level state corruption at a power plant run by Electrogas, a firm owned, among others, by the Azerbaijani state energy company Socar and... Yorgen Fenech.
‘Climate of impunity’
Rumours are now rife about the jurors’ verdict, said Malta Today. Was fear the cause of their decision to acquit? Or was it something more noble? Perhaps they just didn’t trust a police investigation that was riddled by leaks, missing evidence and delayed action, and that failed in particular to conduct a proper investigation of the other chief suspect, Keith Schembri, prime minister Muscat’s former chief of staff, whom the defence accused of being the true mastermind.
Don’t you believe it, said Anna Marie Galea in the Times of Malta. Responsibility for this “shit show” lies with “what has always been this country’s greatest downfall: its people”. Despite the mountains of evidence, they still chase after rumour and wild conspiracy theories – “why did Daphne’s son park where he did the night before?” – and display a total absence of logic and considered thought. “If anyone needed any excuse to banish juries in this country”, this is surely it.
But Caruana Galizia “was and remains right” about the real scandal here, said Andrew Borg Cardona on The Shift (Malta). There truly is a “suffocating intimacy” between big business and politics in Malta.
The public inquiry commissioned by Labour in 2021 concluded that the state itself had created “a climate of impunity, generated from the highest levels at the core of the administration” in which her murder became possible. Yet none of the inquiry’s suggested reforms – criminalising the hindrance of investigations, introducing Italian-style anti-mafia laws – have been implemented by today’s Labour government. It just keeps explaining away its own complicity in the scandal “and we, the Great Unwashed, have to grin and bear it”.
