Murder in Malta / Times Magazine

Corinne Vella’s eyes moisten and her voice grows thick as she recalls the day that her sister, Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta’s top investigative journalist, was killed.

It was shortly after 3pm on October 16, 2017. She had just finished reading her sister’s latest blog, which ended, “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.” Her mobile rang and she saw it was Daphne’s son, Matthew. “I thought, ‘That’s funny.’ He’d message me occasionally, but it was unusual for him to call. He said, ‘You’ve got to come now. There’s been a bomb in Mum’s car.’

“I just picked up my car keys and put my shoes on. I didn’t stop to ask where he was. I was working on instinct.” Ten minutes later, she reached the lane that led to a valley of terraced fields, then up to the hamlet of Bidnija where her sister lived. “It was a total mess: fire engines, people in army gear, police, sirens.”

She knocked aside a policeman trying to block her way. Halfway up the far side, Daphne’s Peugeot 108 was still burning in the field where it had been hurled by the explosion. Of Daphne herself little remained.

“It was one of those surreal moments. You knew what had happened, but at the same time you expected her to turn up and say, ‘It’s OK. I’m here,’ ” Vella recalls.

“I was shocked, but not entirely surprised. When you look back it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It was definitely connected to her work. It was obvious people in and around the government were implicated; I had no doubt of that. But it’s difficult when the lines between politics and business and crime are completely blurred.”

Two years later, Daphne’s family appear tantalisingly close to achieving the justice for which they have fought ever since her brazen murder. Suspects have begun to rat on one another. One of Malta’s richest men, Yorgen Fenech, has been charged with complicity in her murder. Joseph Muscat, the prime minister, has promised to resign amid mounting allegations that Keith Schembri, his chief of staff, and others in the leader’s inner circle were involved.

Slowly but surely the government of a European Union state is being implicated in an assassination of a journalist as heinous as that of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime, or that of Anna Politkovskaya by Russia’s.

And – posthumously – Daphne is completing her mission to expose the venality at the heart of a tiny island state more commonly known for its tourist resorts, red telephone boxes and the George Cross awarded to its people for courageously resisting the Nazis during the Second World War.

Vella describes today’s Malta as a mafia state. “What else do you call it when a criminal organisation takes over a country?” she asks.

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Vella, 55, is tall and slim with dark features like her sister’s. A media and communications professional by background, she now campaigns virtually full-time for justice, as well as continuing defiantly to produce the monthly lifestyle magazine that her sister launched some years ago. She meets me in a hotel situated just outside the ancient limestone walls of the capital, Valletta, which seems appropriate as she and her family are – metaphorically – besieging Malta’s seat of government.

Daphne was born in 1964, a month before Malta gained independence from Britain, the oldest of a businessman’s four daughters. Vella, the second, was born a year later.

The girls grew up under the repressive socialist regime of Dom Mintoff, which nationalised her grandfather’s bank. At 19, Daphne was arrested for protesting against the closure of private Catholic schools of the sort she had herself attended. She was held incommunicado overnight in a darkened cell whose walls were smeared with faeces.

University was out of the question given Daphne’s gender and background. She worked first in her father’s office, then for a marketing company, before marrying a lawyer, Peter, at 21. They bought a rambling stone house in Bidnija, 11 miles northwest of Valletta, with views to St Paul’s Bay to the north, and over the valley where she was killed. There, she bore three sons – Matthew, Andrew and Paul.

In the early Nineties, infuriated by Malta’s drab conservative newspapers, she hammered out on an old typewriter a few columns about everyday life and sent them to the Times of Malta. Impressed, the editor hired her as the island’s first named columnist, writing under the title “The good, the bad and the ugly”.

She later moved to The Malta Independent, a paper she co-founded to break the domination of Malta’s press by the island’s two main parties, the Nationalists and Labour. Then, during the 2008 general election, she began blogging – outspoken, often scornful blogs about Maltese life and politics. The first was headlined “Zero tolerance for corruption”.

She developed a network of sources who trusted her implicitly, never speaking to them on open phone lines. “She would destroy anything that could be traced to somebody. She often said, ‘If the police come to the house, throw my laptop in the well,’ ” says Vella.

The blog, Running Commentary, quickly attracted a huge following, sometimes receiving more visits than the combined circulation of all Malta’s newspapers. She was not always right, but she was essential reading on this politically polarised island of 490,000 people. While some Maltese loved Daphne, as she was universally known, others loathed her and found diverse ways to express their hostility.

She would receive parcels containing dog excrement or handcuffs and abusive telephone calls. One of her dogs, a terrier, was poisoned. She found another, a collie, dead on the doorstep with its throat slit when she returned with her sons from school. Her front door was set on fire after she wrote about cocaine traffickers. When she denounced neo-Nazi groups for persecuting illegal immigrants, tyres doused with petrol were stacked against the back of the house and set alight. The family were saved because Paul arrived home late, saw the flames and raised the alarm. She built a wall around her house and bought a guard dog.

Daphne was undaunted. “She described herself as having a fighter’s personality,” says Vella. “The idea of right and wrong was something we grew up with, and she had a strong sense of injustice.”

In 2013, Labour and Muscat, the party’s personable young leader, won power after decades of Nationalist Party rule, and Daphne was suddenly spoilt for targets. There was the financing of Labour’s lavish election campaign. “They never explained where the money came from,” says Vella. There was the rapid sale of three state hospitals to a private consortium with no expertise in healthcare following a controversial tendering process. There was Labour’s lucrative new “Individual Investor Programme”, commonly known as “cash for passports”. It allowed any number of unsavoury characters to obtain Maltese passports – and unfettered access to the rest of the EU – in return for a 1.15 million euros (£970,000) investment. Malta became “a sunny place for shady people”, Vella quips.

And there was the Electrogas affair. Konrad Mizzi, the energy minister, oversaw the award of a 450 million euros contract to build a power station to a consortium including Yorgen Fenech, the Maltese gambling and property tycoon, and Socar, the Azerbaijani state oil company. Socar was contracted to supply liquefied natural gas to the station for 18 years at nearly double the market rate.

For good measure, Daphne reported that Christian Cardona, the economy minister, had visited a brothel on an official trip to Germany, a claim he’s denied.

In 2016, millions of files were leaked from the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca. From those “Panama Papers” Daphne discovered Schembri and Mizzi had set up shell companies in Panama shortly after Labour’s election victory. “I remember her saying, ‘They can’t possibly survive this,’ ” Vella recalls. “She actually had that kind of faith in the system.”

Daphne was approached by a whistleblower at Pilatus Bank, which opened in Valletta in 2014 and was subsequently closed down by the European Central Bank. Its biggest clients included the daughters of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev; its Iranian owner was arrested on money-laundering charges in the US last year. The whistleblower told Daphne a third Panama shell company, Egrant, had been created for Muscat’s wife, Michelle.

Muscat called Daphne’s allegation “the biggest political lie in Malta’s history”. He announced an inquiry, which exonerated him and his wife, though the full report was never published. And he called a snap election, which he won by a landslide thanks to a booming economy fuelled by tourism and gambling.

The government then “mobilised everyone and everything against Daphne”, says Vella. “The Labour Party is very powerful. They have a television station. They have newspapers and radio. They have a huge following of what they call ‘soldiers of steel’, people devoted to the party no matter what it does. They have an online army. Once you have unleashed that, there’s no taking it back.”

Daphne was labelled “the Bidnija witch”. Death notices appeared online. She was accosted on the streets, spat at, and once forced to seek refuge in a convent, Vella says. “Her freedom was reduced to the point where she felt uncomfortable going out. She ended up unable even to go to the beach because people took photos of her and put them on a blog run by Glenn Bedingfield [a Muscat-supporting MP] targeting Muscat’s critics.”

Her tax returns were investigated. Her son Andrew, a diplomat, was recalled from India and “sidelined”, says Vella. Her foes unleashed a barrage of libel suits against her, including one filed by the prime minister himself and another by Cardona, who secured a court order freezing her assets. She died with 45 libel suits outstanding.

By the autumn of 2017 Daphne had received a cache of leaked documents from Electrogas. She had mentioned a mysterious, Dubai-registered company called 17 Black in a blog but not divined its significance. Nor had she discovered what funds the Panama accounts were intended to receive. “She was hacking her way through a forest to the people in the middle,” says Vella. “She didn’t know who they were or what she was going to find or where the centre was, but the people in the tower in the centre could see her moving closer.”

She never reached the centre. Having filed her last blog on October 16, 2017, she set off to meet her bank manager. At 2.59pm the huge bomb planted beneath her car seat exploded, hurling her car some 50 yards. “It was a message to the country: ‘You don’t touch us,’ ” a Maltese anti-corruption activist tells me.

The spot where her car landed is now a makeshift shrine. The farmer carefully ploughs around it. A banner reads: “We need to know who. We need to know why. We need to see justice. We demand answers. We will not rest.”

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Initially, Muscat’s government made a great show of hunting for Daphne’s killers. It brought in helicopters and drones. It invited the FBI and Europol to assist. The prime minister offered 1 million euros reward. On December 4, 2017, three petty gangsters – Vincent Muscat (no relation) and two brothers, Alfred and George Degiorgio – were arrested and later charged with murder. They have denied the charge.

Investigators say Alfred Degiorgio had kept watch on Daphne’s house from an old British hilltop gun emplacement across the valley. They allege that, when he saw her car leave Bidnija, he telephoned his brother, who was on a boat in the Grand Harbour, Valletta. George, they say, sent a text which triggered the bomb. “Open a bottle of wine for me, baby,” George is then said to have messaged his girlfriend. They were allegedly paid 150,000 euros.

Months passed, a year, two years, but the three alleged killers were not put on trial. Despite Daphne’s allegations, Muscat did not sack his old schoolfriend, Schembri, Mizzi, Cardona or anyone else. The police did not question any government official she had sought to expose. The prime minister resisted her family’s demands for an independent public inquiry. In short, the investigation stalled as a culture of impunity prevailed.

Vella was hardly surprised. The Maltese PM’s extensive powers of appointment create influence over the police commissioner, attorney-general, judiciary, security services, civil service, MPs and the anti-corruption agency. “The people I suspect of complicity in my sister’s murder are in a position to hamper the investigation,” she says. “The people in government are the problem.”

Muscat remained popular at home. He continued to attend EU summits, and was fêted as a business-friendly socialist presiding over 7 per cent annual growth rates. A record 2.6 million tourists visited Malta last year when Valletta was European City of Culture.

At the same time, the prime minister and others continued to pursue nearly 30 libel cases inherited by Daphne’s bereaved family, and Labour supporters continued to taunt them with online comments such as, “I know what to buy Matthew [her son] for Christmas – a jigsaw puzzle called Daphne.”

The Pilatus Bank whistleblower was meanwhile identified and forced to flee to Crete. But pressure on the government grew. A multinational group of journalists from the Daphne Project, set up to continue her work, discovered that 17 Black was owned by Fenech, and had planned to transfer $2 million to Schembri and Mizzi’s Panama companies. They also discovered 17 Black had received $1.5 million from an Azerbaijani-owned company named Mayor Trans.

Malta’s involvement in money-laundering and dodgy passport sales, its role as a gateway to the EU for criminal interests and its violation of core European values began to attract international attention. European institutions issued reports condemning the concentration of power in the prime minister’s hands and its disregard for the rule of law. “Malta’s weaknesses are a source of vulnerability for all of Europe,” said Pieter Omtzigt, a Dutch MP appointed to report on the investigation by the Council of Europe. “Maltese citizenship is EU citizenship, a Maltese visa is a Schengen visa, and a Maltese bank gives access to the European banking system.”

Then, last month, the government’s position suddenly began to crumble.

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In Valletta’s main tourist thoroughfare, Republic Street, flanked by the cathedral and law courts, stands a memorial to Malta’s repulsion of the Ottoman Empire in 1565, except that it has now become a memorial to Daphne.

Each day supporters adorn it with flowers, candles and quotes from the journalist’s blogs. “They would gladly see me dead, which appears to be the only way I will shut up,” one reads. “In any battle between good people and bad ... the bad are invariably more likely to win because they have no moral brakes and boundaries,” another proclaims. Each night, government workers remove the shrine, but they cannot erase Daphne’s memory.

On November 14, Melvin Thuema, a taxi driver and loan shark, was arrested on unrelated charges. He told police that Fenech masterminded Daphne’s murder, and that he was Fenech’s contact with the killers.

In a court hearing, Thuema went further. He quoted Fenech as saying, “Get on with it. I want to kill Daphne.” He said he met Schembri and other members of the PM’s staff who gave him a phantom job on the government’s payroll, and told him to promise the three alleged killers – still in custody and staying silent – 1 million euros each, plus bail.

On November 20, Fenech was arrested by armed forces as he tried to flee Malta on his luxury yacht and charged with complicity in murder – a charge he denies. The 38-year-old shaven-headed tycoon told a subsequent court hearing that Schembri had warned him his phone was tapped, kept him informed throughout about the state of the murder investigation, and given him a “script” of what to tell the police after his arrest. Schembri has denied involvement in Daphne’s murder.

Events have since gathered pace. Schembri and Mizzi resigned, and Cardona suspended himself, though Vella believes Schembri still has influence over the prime minister’s office. Valletta is rocked by frequent anti-government demonstrations, with Daphne’s elderly parents to the fore. Muscat suspended parliament, a focal point for discontent, until late January. Professional associations and trade unions have rounded on the PM, who has belatedly conceded a public inquiry into whether the state could have prevented Daphne’s death.

At the very least Vella believes that people in government created the conditions that made Daphne’s murder possible, and then protected the perpetrators. “It’s impossible for me to believe they didn’t know what was happening,” she says.

On December 1, Muscat announced he would resign after Labour chooses a new leader in January, but his opponents fear he will find some way to cling on or handpick a successor who will protect him. The leader of an EU fact-finding mission said Muscat should go immediately to ensure the integrity of the murder investigation.

“What we’re seeing now is the unravelling of the government as a direct result of my sister’s work,” Vella says. “If there’s any lasting legacy, if any good is to come of her death, it is that things may yet change for the better because people have realised how much is wrong here.”

She is not complacent; the battle is far from won. “There’s a window of opportunity, but the problems that led to Daphne’s death are still there. The corrupt people with influence are not going away. They’ll continue to do what it takes to save themselves. It will get a lot uglier before it gets better.”

But one day, she hopes, her family will have time to do something it has been quite unable to do so far. “We’ve not had a single moment to grieve,” she says.