‘Joseph Muscat must resign’, says former PN leader Simon Busuttil after Fenech arrest

Former Nationalist Party leader Simon Busuttil has called for the resignation of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, after Tumas Group CEO Yorgen Fenech was arrested earlier this morning.

Fenech’s luxury yacht ‘Gio’ was intercepted by the Armed Forces of Malta at around 5:45am, after leaving the marina of the Portomaso development his father built in the 1990s.

The arrest came less than 24 hours after the prime minister said he would award a presidential pardon to an alleged middleman, a taxi driver with criminal priors by the name of Melvin Theuma, who said he would provide evidence on the assassination of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

“The Prime Minister’s position is untenable,” Busuttil said. “He must resign now and let justice take its course.”

In a comment to the press, Muscat said he had “no indication that there is a politician or someone in high office involved in the murder.”

He refused to enter the political merits of the case, and whether Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi should resign.

The implications for Muscat go beyond this pardon.

The Labour leader’s historic 2013 win had the reduction of energy prices and the construction of a LNG power plant as its main electoral plank. His energy minister Konrad Mizzi led the project, after Yorgen Fenech’s Electrogas, which included business magnate Joe Gasan, and Azeri state gas company Socar and the German firm Siemens, were selected to build and supply gas to the plant.

Mizzi and Muscat’s chief of staff Keith Schembri were later revealed to have opened offshore companies, revealed by the Panama Papers.

In February 2017, Caruana Galizia posted a cryptic image of Mizzi, Schembri and Muscat with the name ‘17 Black’. She was killed by a car bomb in October 2017.

The Daphne Project set up to work on the cache of emails leaked from Electrogas and which had been in the possession of Caruana Galizia, later revealed that the owner of the Dubai company 17 Black was indeed Yorgen Fenech, and that companies owned by Keith Schembri - such as Macbridge - had been indicated as “target clients” for 17 Black.