Yorgen Fenech acquitted of the charge of instigating the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia

Eight jurors voted against, only one in favor of the prosecution. Thus the Maltese tycoon Yorgen Fenech was acquitted at the conclusion of the trial which began on July 1st on charges of conspiracy and complicity in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, killed on 16 October 2017 by a bomb planted in her car. After nine years, Malta has five men in prison convicted for having physically organized and carried out the attack, a confessed intermediary pardoned for having told who gave him the order, but no one found guilty of having given it.

A few minutes after the verdict Fenech left the court a free man, surrounded by journalists waiting for him at the entrance. A hint of a smile, a few words, then he got into the car and drove away with one of his lawyers. A scene that was difficult to imagine until a few hours earlier, almost seven years after the arrest on November 20, 2019, during which the prosecutor's office built the case against the tycoon accused of being the instigator, keeping him in preventive detention for over five years and 2 months before obtaining probation.

For 44 days the prosecution displayed witnesses, wiretaps, messages, telephone data and money movements before the jury. Evidence from which dozens of other corruption trials arose and which uncovered other cases. At the center Melvin Theuma, the intermediary pardoned in 2019, who indicated Fenech as the man who entrusted him with 150,000 euros to organize the assassination. Much less was enough for the defense: to open a crack in its reconstruction and have the accused speak publicly for the first time since his arrest. Fenech took the witness stand and for four days pointed the finger directly at Keith Schembri, once his close friend and then very powerful chief of staff of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

"He was the real instigator," he said, pointing to Schembri, who has always denied any involvement and is not a defendant in the trial. The Tumas Group heir with a passion for secret societies in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, the one who "panicked" on February 22, 2017 when Daphne published the first post under the name '17 Black'. Whoever killed her, the Degiorgio brothers who prepared, armed and detonated the bomb with a detonator activated by a mobile phone, said that already in 2015 there was a plot to kill Daphne, initiated by the former finance minister Cardona. The prosecutor's office never found evidence of this. Just as he did not find any that linked the matter directly to Schembri. Fenech was arrested on November 20, 2019 as his yacht left Portomaso. Two weeks later the Muscat government fell. On 29 July 2021 the independent public inquiry conducted by senior magistrates concluded that "the Maltese state is responsible for the circumstances that led to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia".