Missing phone, old friendships and murder allegations dominate Malta courtroom

Missing phone, old friendships and murder allegations dominate Malta courtroom

Keith Schembri served as chief of staff to Malta’s prime minister at the time investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated. He testified this week that the killing was commissioned by businessman Yorgen Fenech, who is on trial. Fenech has denied the allegations and accused Schembri.

Yorgen Fenech — the Maltese businessman on trial for allegedly commissioning the assassination of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia — allegedly indicated he was involved in the killing, the prime minister’s former chief of staff testified this week.

"We went out for a drink somewhere. He said things that led me to believe that he might have been the one who did it, and I just froze," the former chief of staff, Keith Schembri, told a courtroom in the Maltese capital of Valletta.

Schembri told no one about the conversation, not even his boss, then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. 

"I made one single mistake: when I started hearing things, I didn’t go straight to the prime minister. That was a huge mistake and a heavy cross to bear," Schembri testified.

Fenech has pleaded not guilty to charges of complicity and criminal association. He has alleged for years that Schembri ordered the murder, as have two of the three convicted hitmen. 

Across three days of testimony this week, Schembri rejected the accusations, saying he had no connection to the killing or to the men who carried it out. 

Caruana Galizia was 53 years old when she was killed on October 16, 2017, by a bomb placed under her car seat and detonated remotely by SMS. She had spent years reporting on corruption within Muscat’s government.

Five men have been convicted over the murder. Schembri, who was Muscat’s powerful chief of staff, is not charged in connection with it.

He is charged alongside Fenech in a separate corruption case linked to the Electrogas Project, a multi-million euro Maltese government plan to build a new gas power station. Fenech was a shareholder in a company involved in the project. Caruana Galizia was investigating it when she was murdered. 

Schembri faces further charges over allegedly leaking information from the murder investigation, and for his alleged involvement in getting a government job for Melvin Theuma, the confessed middleman in the Galizia murder case who was pardoned in exchange for testifying.

More than 10 hours of recordings that Theuma made of Fenech are central to the prosecution’s case. On one tape, Fenech tells Theuma twice that Schembri had “gone into the fire” for him. 

Asked what that meant in court this week, Schembri said he had helped Fenech because he was a friend. He denied claims that he passed on information from the murder investigation.

Schembri and Fenech had known each other since their teens. Their wives and children were friends. Schembri confirmed he had been in a WhatsApp group with Fenech and with Silvio Valletta, the deputy police commissioner. Valletta was later removed from the murder investigation.

Contact continued until the night before Fenech’s arrest on November 20, 2019. In Signal messages shown to jurors, Fenech had written: "Help me. Don’t leave me alone. Give me support."

Schembri’s own phone has never been found. Experts told the court it was last active at 5:03 am near his home, about an hour before officers arrived to arrest him. He testified this week that workmen may have taken it. But defence lawyers noted that this explanation appears in no formal statement, no officer’s record, and no photograph of the scene. 

At the end of his first day of testimony on July 28, Schembri alleged that two of Fenech’s lawyers, Charles Mercieca and Gianluca Caruana Curran, offered a key prosecution witness 600,000 euros to testify in Fenech’s favor. Mercieca and Curran denied that allegation in court.