Cardona dismisses Caruana Galizia murder claims as ‘nonsense, based on lies’

The former minister for the economy and Labour’s deputy leader for party affairs, Chris Cardona, has dismissed claims made in court alleging he played a role in the Caruana Galizia murder, saying they were nothing but nonsense. 

Testifying in court on Monday, Melvin Theuma, the middleman in the journalist’s 2017 assassination, claimed that Cardona had passed on money, through another middleman, to Alfred Degiorgio, known as il-Fulu - one of the three men accused of executing the car bomb murder. 

Theuma claimed that Mario Degiorgio, brother to Alfred and George Degiorgio, had told him that David Gatt, a lawyer who worked in Cardona’s firm, had sent a message to the Degiorgio brothers warning them that if they revealed anything about Cardona’s involvement, he could have them killed. 

He went on to claim that Yorgen Fenech – the man accused of masterminding the murder – had told him that Cardona was so worried after the murder that he had to be admitted to hospital after overdosing on “pills". 

In a reaction to the allegations, however, Cardona told Times of Malta that these were nothing but “nonsense, based on lies that don't even make sense.” 

He said that the claims were an attempt to frame him and pin the murder on him. 

Lawyer David Gatt, moreover, described the allegations as “fantasy” and said he had ceased to be a part of Cardona's law firm 10 years ago, as soon as the PC99 allegations, which accused him of being the mastermind of the HSBC heist, came out.

In November 2019, Cardona had suspended himself as economy minister in the wake of mass protests concerning revelations emerging from the Caruana Galizia murder case. He was not made a minister when Robert Abela took over Joseph Muscat as prime minister. 

Last April, he also stepped down from a Labour MP, but said he would be retaining his role as the party's deputy leader. 

Cardona had courted controversy in January 2017, when Caruana Galizia had alleged that the then minister had been at a brothel in Germany while on official government business, claims which he has consistently denied.