Dismantling the mafia state

It’s two years since Daphne Caruana Galizia, the best investigative journalist in Malta, was killed by a car bomb.

She had been using the huge leaks of financial data in the “Panama Papers” to track down suspicious dealings by members of the Maltese government, and she was getting too close for comfort.

At first the assassins planned to shoot her at her home, through a window where she often sat while working at her laptop, but in the end they decided on a car bomb.

They bought it from Maltese gangsters (who probably got it from the Italian mafia), and planted it under the driver’s seat of her car. They triggered it remotely as soon as she got in.

The killers were arrested in December 2017, but they did not reveal who ordered the hit. Fast forward two years, and a police sniffer dog at Malta’s Luqa airport, raises the alarm.

He has smelled something different in the bags of a passenger bound for Istanbul. When they are opened, they turn out to contain €233 000s (about R3.65 million)in cash.

The police trace it to Melvin Theuma, parttime taxi driver, full-time operator of a numbers racket, and fixer to the rich and the lowlifes alike. When they search his home, they find more than €2 million in cash.

Theuma is arrested by the Malta police’s economic crimes unit – and he starts singing like a canary. He was the middleman in setting up the contract killing of Caruana Galizia in 2017, he says, and he will name names in return for an amnesty and “protection”.

Next thing you know, Malta’s richest man, Yorgen Fenech, leaves the island on his yacht after he is tipped off that Theuma has identified him as the man who paid to have Caruana Galizia killed. He is arrested at sea and brought back to Malta, and he starts to sing too.

Fenech has large property and gambling interests in Malta, and he has friends in high places. His tip-off came from Keith Schembri, the chief of staff to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who Fenech now claims was the real mastermind of the Caruana Galizia murder.

In return for a pardon, Fenech will tell all he knows – but Muscat’s Cabinet refuses to make that deal. Curious. Schembri resigns and is briefly arrested, but he is soon released without charge. Fenech says “If I go down, Schembri goes with me”. Prime Minister Muscat announces he will step down, but only after the investigation is completed.

The Maltese live in a part of the world where corruption, frequently accompanied by violence, is the norm, and where even governments are often controlled by the crooks.

You can certainly see echoes of that tradition in the current events in Malta, but in fact Malta’s state institutions are mostly working as they should to clean up the mess – and the credit for that goes to the European Union (EU).

The EU, despite the delusions of Britain’s Brexiters, is not mainly an economic organisation. It was created in the 1950s, after two devastating world wars that began in Europe, to prevent any return to that catastrophic past.

Economic integration is part of the strategy, but the bigger part is that the EU protects and promotes democracy and the rule of law in all its members. That’s why the nascent “mafia state” in Malta is being exposed and dismantled.

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