Accused of journalist's murder points to prime minister's chief of staff. Shock in Malta—that man was never charged

Maltese businessman Yorgen Fenech took the witness stand in his own defense on Friday and told the jury that Keith Schembri, then Prime Minister's office chief, had presented to him the plan to murder journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Schembri testified in the same trial three weeks earlier, rejected the accusations as fabrication, and was never charged with the murder. Thus the case concerns a murder whose investigation two years later brought down the Maltese Prime Minister, in a trial that is already the second longest Maltese criminal trial in a homicide case. Lovin Malta ↗ The Malta Independent ↗

The Nine Years Nobody Talks About

The name Daphne Caruana Galizia means little to most Slovak readers today, yet she was the victim of the most famous journalist murder in the European Union. She was 53 when on October 16, 2017, she got into her car near her home and was killed by a bomb placed under the seat and detonated by SMS message. Years before, she had written about corruption in Joseph Muscat's government, and at the time of her murder she was investigating the Electrogas power plant project. OCCRP ↗

Political consequences came only two years later. On December 1, 2019, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced he was stepping down, amid the crisis triggered by arrests in the murder case. Al Jazeera ↗

The criminal branch has already handed down sentences, but so far only for those who carried out the murder or enabled it. Vince Muscat, known as il-Koħħu, received fifteen years in February 2021 after he confessed. Brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio changed their testimony from denial to confession in October 2022, a few days before the fifth anniversary of the murder, and the court sentenced them to forty years. Life sentences were handed down in June 2025 for Robert Agius and Jamie Vella, who supplied the explosives, and the appeals court upheld them in January of this year. Lovin Malta ↗ Reportéri bez hraníc ↗ OCCRP ↗ Committee to Protect Journalists ↗

Meanwhile, in July 2021, a public inquiry reached a conclusion that still resonates in Malta. According to the inquiry, the state bears responsibility for the murder because it created an atmosphere of impunity, which according to the final report originated at the highest levels of the Prime Minister's Office and spread "like an octopus" to regulatory institutions and the police. The Malta Independent ↗

But the most difficult question, both politically and legally, remained unanswered: who ordered the murder. It is precisely this question that has been being decided before a jury since July 1, 2026. Amphora Media ↗

What Fenech Testified

Fenech testified in his own defense. According to his version, the topic first came up at a lunch on his ranch, attended by both Schembri and Theuma. Schembri was allegedly "almost obsessed" with Daphne, regularly read her blog and kept a folder with her articles. According to Fenech, Theuma allegedly suggested at the time that "we could easily get rid of her," which Fenech claims he took lightly. Lovin Malta ↗

The turning point allegedly came after a trip through Heathrow in 2016. At that time, Schembri allegedly told him a statement that Fenech repeated before the jury like this: "I spoke with my friends and a plan is already forming to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia." According to Fenech, the sum of 120,000 euros was also mentioned, and he himself claims he was shocked by what he heard. When he later returned from abroad, Theuma allegedly informed him that 30,000 had already been paid. Lovin Malta ↗

What follows is the claim on which his entire defense rests. Fenech told the jury that he went to the office, took 50,000 euros and gave them to Theuma with the words: "I don't want you to be out of pocket, but end this here." Fenech presented this to the jury as meaning the money was not payment for the murder, but an attempt to stop the plan. Schembri allegedly responded: "You did the right thing." Both the prosecution and Theuma's version dispute this interpretation. Lovin Malta ↗

Fenech further claims that Theuma recorded Schembri and that those recordings, in his view, still exist. According to Fenech, Schembri listened to them twice, once through a police commissioner and once directly from a USB drive. Fenech himself admitted in court that during that period he was deepening his drug addiction and was obtaining drugs precisely through Theuma. In his testimony before the jury, he denied his involvement in the murder, saying it was nonexistent. Lovin Malta ↗ Amphora Media ↗

However, his version is not constant over time, and the jury knows this. Shortly before, they played for the jury recordings of Fenech's police interrogation from late November 2019. In them he says that "it all started with Keith Schembri," that Schembri had been asking him since 2014 to find someone to murder, and that he acted on his orders. At the same time, he there admits to payments to Theuma and disputes his numbers by saying it was 120,000, not 150,000. He thus denies ordering the murder, but does not deny involvement in the matter. Amphora Media ↗

The Man He Pointed To Denies Everything

All of this is the testimony of the accused, who has a clear interest in shifting responsibility elsewhere. And the man he is talking about got an opportunity to respond earlier.

Keith Schembri spent three days on the witness stand in late July and denied practically every accusation leveled against him. He denied ordering or enabling the murder, leaking confidential police information, warning Fenech about the investigation, or trying to influence him. He called the claims that he orchestrated the murder an outrageous lie and repeatedly insisted he was merely trying to support a close friend who was in trouble. The Shift News ↗ MaltaToday ↗

What matters legally is what this implies. Schembri faces separate prosecution in the corruption branch, but police have never charged him in connection with the Caruana Galizia murder. In this trial, he is a witness, not the accused. OCCRP ↗ The Shift News ↗

Third version that fights with both

The jury is therefore not choosing between two versions, but between three, and each of them excludes the others.

Melvin Theuma, an acknowledged intermediary who received a pardon in exchange for testimony, testified before Fenech for an entire week. Before the jury, he repeated that as far as he was concerned, the orderer was only one person and that was Fenech. However, he himself admitted that in one of his letters about Schembri he lied, which he explained by confusion in his own head. The defense spent the final day of his examination questioning his credibility. For the prosecution, Theuma is a key witness, while the defense places his credibility at the center of the dispute. MaltaToday ↗ TVM News ↗

Each of these three thus points to someone else. Fenech points to Schembri, Schembri denies everything and is not accused, Theuma points back at Fenech and himself admitted to lying once. The jury does not have a version that would be confirmed by all three.

The money that was behind it all along

To make sense of why these people's names ended up together in the first place, we need to go back to what Caruana Galizia developed.

In November 2018, thanks to a joint investigation by the Times of Malta and the Reuters agency, it was revealed that the owner of the Dubai company 17 Black is Yorgen Fenech. According to an email from December 2015 that emerged from the Panama Papers circle, Panama companies of Keith Schembri and then-energy minister Konrad Mizzi were supposed to receive payments from 17 Black of 150,000 dollars a month. No evidence that the payments actually took place was released. Fenech's Tumas group was at the same time part of the Electrogas consortium, which obtained a concession from the state for a gas power plant, thus a pre-election promise of the Muscat government from 2013. The Shift News ↗

This branch has a life of its own. In February 2025, Fenech, Schembri, Mizzi and others were brought to trial in the corruption case around 17 Black, where they face accusations of corruption, money laundering, influence peddling and criminal conspiracy. Formally, this has nothing to do with the murder. MaltaToday ↗

Family in the courtroom

During the summer, those for whom this is not a case but a loss also took the stand before the jury. Husband Peter described how his wife never met her grandchildren. Son Matthew, who himself worked on the Panama Papers, explained how the investigation got from there to Electrogas and described the final minutes before the explosion. Second son Andrew spoke about the final months of his mother and what remained of the family afterward, and his testimony concluded the prosecution's case. MaltaToday ↗ Newsbook ↗ MaltaToday ↗

Why to read this from Slovakia

Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová were murdered on February 21, 2018, thus four months after Caruana Galizia. The pattern was similar: a journalist writing about the connections between business and politics, an intermediary who later reached an agreement with the state, and the question of who ordered it, which dragged through the courts substantially longer than the evidence against the actual perpetrators.

Precisely for this reason, the Maltese trial is interesting from here too. It does not show how a murder is proven, but how difficult it is to prove who ordered it when the main actors accuse each other and the key witness testified only in exchange for a pardon.

Limits of this view

This text is based mostly on Maltese media outlets that broadcast live coverage from the proceedings, namely Lovin Malta, MaltaToday, The Malta Independent, TVM and The Shift News. This is ongoing court reporting, not verified conclusions. The Shift News is explicitly an investigative website that has long taken a critical stance toward the case of the Muscat era.

More fundamentally: everything that Fenech said on the witness stand is testimony of the accused in his own case. It is not evidence and the jury has not yet weighed it. Likewise, Schembri denied the accusations and has not been charged in connection with the murder, so his name appears here as the name of a witness spoken about by the accused. The jury will decide on Yorgen Fenech's guilt, not the media.

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