Court orders police to exhibit Yorgen Fenech emails in Mark Camilleri libel case

A court hearing a libel case filed by Labour MP Rosianne Cutajar against Mark Camilleri has ordered the lead homicide investigator Keith Arnaud to search for evidence of an email confirming a trip abroad involving Yorgen Fenech and MP Rosianne Cutajar.

The court however did not uphold the former National Book Council chairman Mark Camilleri’s request that it order the exhibition of chats between Yorgen Fenech and the MP, which form part of the evidence gathered in the murder investigation.

Camilleri appeared in court for a sitting of the libel case filed against him by Labour MP Rosianne Cutajar.

As the court had upheld Cutajar’s request for the inversion of the burden of proof in a previous sitting, Camilleri’s lawyer, Joseph Mizzi, summoned Superintendent Keith Arnaud to the stand.

Mizzi had asked the witness to exhibit copies of chats between Fenech and Cutajar, "which include indecent photographs of Rosianne Cutaar, wearing few clothes" which form part of the evidence in the criminal case against Fenech.

But the court blocked the request, pointing out that the superintendent could not be asked to testify about evidence exhibited in criminal proceedings.

“Are you expecting the superintendent to go get a copy of the messages from the case file?” asked presiding magistrate Rachel Montebello.

“What I know is that the superintendent is in possession of this information,” replied the lawyer. The magistrate pointed out that the permission of the Criminal Court was required in order to exhibit this information.

Mizzi rebutted, arguing that the Criminal Court had already given a decree allowing this information to be exhibited in other proceedings. 

The court was not swayed, however, insisting that the superior court’s permission was still needed.

Arnaud was asked whether he was in possession of any emails relating to a hotel stay in Paris booked on Expedia. The allegation is that a room at the Buddha Bar Hotel in Paris had been booked by Fenech for Valentine's Day 2019. “I only looked at the information relating to the murder,” replied the Superintendent.

“Someone performed a filtering process then,” suggested Mizzi. But Arnaud said he did not know who had filtered the information, repeating that he had instructed his team to only look at the relevant information.

The magistrate ordered him to search for it, as well as for an exchange of correspondence between Fenech and Diane Izzo in the days leading up to Fenech's arrest, which Camilleri had also requested.

The court, however, also observed that the witness was not the ideal person to be summoned to testify about the information requested in the summons, as copies would have to be made from the acts of a criminal case. This required the special permission of the court hearing the proceedings, said the magistrate.

Camilleri had been expected to testify today but the court was advised that this would have to take place in the next sitting as the defence wanted to exhibit evidence beforehand.

Lawyers Edward Gatt and Ishmael Psaila appeared for Cutajar.

The case continues in September.