The lion, the mosquito and the Muscat-era nexus

Facing the prospect of a life sentence on charges he masterminded Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, many expected Yorgen Fenech to bring the Muscat-era system of government down with him. 

Instead, while accusing Keith Schembri of masterminding the killing, Fenech’s testimony has done little to implicate the system itself. 

Fenech largely presented the business and political relationships surrounding 17 Black and Electrogas as legitimate. His account echoes the defence previously offered by other protagonists of the Joseph Muscat years, including Schembri himself, following the Panama Papers and 17 Black revelations. Schembri had described these as normal business transactions. 

The political irony is hard to miss. The Maltese state, through the prosecution, is placing the corruption scandals of the Muscat years at the heart of the murder case. Yet, Fenech defended his own modus operandi within that same system. And while the accused dragged Muscat’s former chief of staff into the murder narrative, he simultaneously defended Electrogas, denying any corrupt relationship with Schembri or Konrad Mizzi, and dismissing the significance of 17 Black. Fenech even portrayed his relationships with politicians, police officers, regulators and officials as legitimate business or close personal friendships. 

Ironically, it was within this intricate web of friendships, which blurred institutional and business roles, that the murder and possibly the subsequent attempts to cover it up, had occurred. This is why the proverbial ‘friends of friends’ network denounced by Alfred Sant in the 1990s is so applicable to this case. 

17 Black, Electrogas leak and the prosecution’s case 

The prosecution’s opening salvo clearly placed the motive for the murder in what Fenech feared Caruana Galizia was about to publish. The indictment alleges that after the murder plot resumed following the 2017 general election, Fenech repeatedly pressured Melvin Theuma to ensure the killing was carried out quickly because he believed Caruana Galizia was preparing to publish damaging information concerning him. 

The prosecution placed this against the background of Caruana Galizia’s investigations into Electrogas, 17 Black and the secret offshore companies belonging to Schembri and Mizzi. 

17 Black was a Dubai-based company owned by Fenech. Caruana Galizia was the first to write about it in February 2017, albeit in a very cryptic way. However, 17 Black’s ownership remained undisclosed by the time the journalist was assassinated in October 2017. 

It was only a year later that Times of Malta and Reuters revealed that Fenech owned the company, just a few months after it was revealed that 17 Black was a target client for the Panama companies set up by Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi. These details that emerged after Caruana Galizia’s assassination had cast the murder in a different light.

READ ALSO | 17 Black: From Daphne’s cryptic post to criminal charges

The Electrogas leak provides another crucial piece of context. Internal emails and documents from Electrogas servers began reaching Daphne Caruana Galizia from a whistleblower in early 2017 and continued after her death. Her son Matthew testified that they were working through hundreds, possibly thousands, of documents, while Andrew Caruana Galizia described the leak as her major unfinished investigation. 

For the prosecution, this development places Fenech squarely within the subject matter of Daphne’s final investigation—he was an Electrogas shareholder and the frontman for the project, the owner of 17 Black and a person harbouring very intimate links to senior government figures. 

But for Fenech, 17 Black was simply another company he owned. 

Asked by the prosecution, who owned 17 Black, Fenech replied: “I do, and it has nothing to do with Electrogas.” 

He said he had opened the company in the United Arab Emirates to conduct business in Asia. “It wasn’t a secret company; I was its sole owner.” 

The reality is that the ownership of the company was not readily apparent from ordinary public company records, and it was investigative reporting that established that Yorgen Fenech was its owner. Its relevance also grew because it was indicated a target client of Panama companies owned by the then energy minister and Muscat’s chief of staff. 

Fenech acknowledged that Caruana Galizia was the first to write about 17 Black but dismissed allegations of illicit dealings as “insinuations”, insisting “that was not the case”. 

The same position emerged when he was questioned about Konrad Mizzi. Confronted with messages in which Mizzi instructed him to delete WhatsApp messages, Fenech rejected the suggestion that Mizzi was worried. 

Asked whether he knew Mizzi and Schembri had registered their respective companies, Hearnville and Tillgate in Panama, Fenech said he learned about both from the media. 

“With all due respect, I had no commercial relationships with Mizzi and Schembri,” he replied from the witness stand. 

When the prosecution suggested that his relationship with Mizzi and the Electrogas project pointed to something improper, Fenech said he was “shocked” that the Attorney General’s Office was questioning him about Electrogas. Asked whether he had panicked over the Electrogas leak, he said he “didn’t lose any sleep over it”. 

On this point, Fenech and Schembri are strikingly aligned. Both rejected the suggestion that their offshore companies and business dealings were evidence of corruption, presenting them as legitimate arrangements. 

But Melvin Theuma offered a very different picture. He told the jury that Fenech was so concerned about the 17 Black revelations that he even offered money to the Nationalist Party to prevent David Casa from being re-elected an MEP. Casa had been writing and campaigning heavily about 17 Black. 

That allegation, if accepted, would sit awkwardly with Fenech’s portrayal of 17 Black as a legitimate business matter that caused him little concern. 

Obsession: Schembri’s motive in Fenech’s narrative 

The motive that Fenech’s narrative attributed to Schembri was personal hostility towards Daphne Caruana Galizia, rather than preventing the journalist from exposing corruption related to Electrogas and 17 Black. 

Asked who he believed was responsible for the assassination, Fenech dryly replied: “Keith Schembri is the mastermind.” 

He also claimed the prosecution was missing the bigger picture: “His [Schembri’s] fingerprints are all over it; you’re just not seeing it.” 

A central element to Fenech’s narrative is Caruana Galizia’s reporting about Schembri’s eye tumour and health. Fenech testified that Schembri was deeply affected by it. The issue was so personal that Schembri’s daughter had asked him: “Daddy, are you going to die?” 

In Fenech’s account, Schembri’s motivation was deeply personal with the sequence moving towards the murder plot and Theuma telling him: “We’ll get rid of her quickly.” 

Fenech said he subsequently raised the matter with Schembri, who allegedly responded: “Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.” 

Fenech’s account presented Schembri as a powerful man, whose personal grievance and obsession with Caruana Galizia ultimately intersected with the murder plot. 

A businessman amongst criminals 

Fenech also constructed a particular self-portrait from the witness stand. He depicted himself as a businessman, who became entangled with people considerably more dangerous than himself. 

He described the people around Theuma as “the worst people in Malta” and spoke of fearing Theuma, despite acknowledging that he had worked for his father for many years. In reference to the murderous plot, Fenech insisted: “I am not into these sorts of things.” 

Theuma, by contrast, described Fenech as a lion: “I’m a mosquito compared to him. Who would believe me without the recordings?” 

Prosecutor Godwin Cini put that characterisation to Fenech, asking whether he accepted Theuma’s description of himself as a mosquito and Fenech as a lion. 

“Absolutely not,” Fenech replied. He added: “I had a lot of contacts who were high up, but if you look at my phone, I also had plenty of contacts who held no power at all.” 

His self-portrait is therefore not of a businessman at the centre of a corrupt political-business network, who used criminal intermediaries to protect his own interests. It is of a businessman who became entangled with dangerous people and was subsequently threatened and blackmailed to the point of being entangled in a murder plot he claimed never to have ordered. 

Crucially, while admitting to giving Theuma €50,000 after learning of the murder plot, Fenech presented himself as having been the victim, caught in an extortionate relationship with dangerous people. 

That narrative will have to be tested against the recordings made by Theuma and the actions he admitted making. But it is the narrative Fenech has presented to the jury. 

The friends network around Fenech 

But one thing emerged strikingly from the trial—Fenech’s relationships and level of familiarity with people occupying positions of public authority. 

The network examined in court extended beyond politics and big business to regulators and public institutions. 

Fenech’s relationships or contacts included former deputy police commissioner Silvio Valletta, former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri, former MFSA chief Joseph Cuschieri, former MGA chief Heathcliff Farrugia, former tax commissioner Marvin Gaerty, former police anti-money-laundering chief Ray Aquilina, Planning Authority CEO Johann Buttigieg and then Labour MP Rosianne Cutajar. 

In one exchange read out in court, Cutajar asked Fenech to “find out” for her any information in the context of a Cabinet reshuffle. In another exchange, Johann Buttigieg told Fenech: “When you want, I’ll do business. I will do business with you wherever you want.” Fenech dismissed the latter as “just business jargon”. 

Silvio Valletta was both a close friend, a senior police officer involved in the murder investigation, and a member of the FIAU board. They travelled together for football and Fenech paid for tickets. 

When the prosecution suggested these relationships demonstrated that Fenech exploited access to powerful people, he replied: “I did not take advantage of them.” 

Yorgen even presented himself as a benefactor to anyone, hinting that he had even “helped” parte civile lawyer Jason Azzopardi, without substantiating the claim. 

And ultimately, central to the case is the friendship between the scion of the Tumas family and the former chief of staff of the prime minister—a friendship which ended with Fenech blaming Schembri for murder. 

Fenech also implicated Schembri in keeping him abreast of pending investigations. The leaks included a confidential Europol report and a court decision (hours before being issued) concerning a request for a magisterial inquiry into 17 Black. But Fenech did not portray him as the architect of a wider web of corrupt dealings, spanning different public entities. 

In short, the prosecution sees a network. Fenech sees personal relationships. 

The political irony 

This is the unusual political irony at the heart of the trial. For while some vocal PN supporters have been fired up by the defence’s strategy to blame the murder on Keith Schembri, it is also a narrative that absolves Yorgen Fenech from involvement in the corruption and impropriety denounced by civil society activists. 

This is politically remarkable. The man arguably best placed to expose the inner workings of the system is instead largely defending the legitimacy of his own dealings within it. While shifting the blame onto Schembri, Fenech is not really bringing the Muscat era eco-system of improper relationships, down with him. In his narrative Schembri was simply “obsessed with killing Daphne Caruana Galizia” for deeply personal reasons. 

On the other hand, the prosecution is constructing its murder case against the background of the corruption scandals and networks that defined the Muscat years. 

In that sense, the murder trial is partly vindicating the concerns raised by anti-corruption activists over the years about the proximity between political power and big money. 

A power nexus under the spotlight 

But this does not mean the political ecosystem navigated by Fenech and Schembri escapes scrutiny. Quite the opposite. 

The trial has placed under the microscope the proximity between big business, political power, regulators, senior police officers and people connected to organised crime. 

The larger question is why so many of these relationships were possible in the first place. Why were there so few institutional firewalls separating political decision-making from major private business interests? 

That is the part of the Muscat-era legacy a murder trial cannot resolve. It requires political reckoning and an effort to create the missing firewalls—stronger rules on lobbying, gifts, political access, meetings and communications with major business interests, clearer restrictions on informal relationships between those controlling public power and those with substantial private financial interests. 

Seven years after Yorgen Fenech’s arrest, Robert Abela’s government shows little political will to address these issues. 

The danger is that without a political reckoning, the system exposed by Daphne’s investigations and the trial itself will remain largely intact, leaving open the possibility that history could repeat itself, with equally tragic consequences.