Justice Disappears in Valletta

Nearly nine years after an anti-corruption journalist was killed by a car bomb on a small Mediterranean island, the legal apparatus of the European Union’s smallest member state has delivered its predictably empty resolution. By an eight-to-one majority, a Maltese jury cleared property tycoon Yorgen Fenech of complicity in the 2017 assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The judge, Edwina Grima, immediately ordered his release from custody.

The trial was meant to serve as a rigorous test of institutional integrity. Instead, it provided a textbook illustration of how power structures protect themselves while allowing justice to evaporate into administrative noise. Prosecutors had accused Fenech of funneling €150,000 through a middleman, taxi driver Melvin Theuma, to organize the hit on Caruana Galizia—a reporter who had spent years systematically exposing the financial entanglements of Malta's political and business elite.

Yet during two months of testimony, the courtroom degenerated into a public display of elite finger-pointing. Fenech’s defense team successfully convinced the jury that the prosecution had aimed too low, pointing the finger directly at Keith Schembri, the former chief of staff to then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. Fenech testified that he was merely a messenger between Schembri and the middleman, alleging that Schembri had routinely leaked sensitive police intelligence to him throughout the murder investigation. Schembri denied all involvement under oath, but the defense’s strategy hit its mark: when every level of authority is compromised, individual criminal responsibility simply dissolves.

This outcome lays bare the hollow mechanics of state governance in Valletta. While the political fallout from the murder previously forced the resignations of Muscat, Schembri, and two cabinet ministers, criminal accountability remains perennially out of reach. An independent public inquiry in 2021 had already concluded that the state itself bore responsibility for cultivating an atmosphere of impunity from the very highest levels of government. Yet key recommendations from that inquiry remain unfulfilled.

The prosecution is expected to appeal the verdict, while opposition leader Alex Borg called for parliamentary demonstrations and civil society groups warned that the decision signals open season on journalists. But the broader reality is far less surprising. When state machinery is designed to insulate those at the top, a court verdict of this nature is not a breakdown of the system—it is the system working precisely as intended.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com