Eight sworn votes against, only one in favor of the prosecution. Thus the Maltese tycoon Yorgen Fenech was acquitted at the conclusion of the trial that began last July 1 with charges of conspiracy and complicity in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, killed on October 16, 2017 by a bomb placed in her car.
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After nine years Malta has five men in prison convicted for having materially organized and carried out the attack, a confessed intermediary pardoned for revealing who gave him the order, but no one recognized as 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, few words, then he got into a car and drove away with one of his lawyers.
A scene hardly imaginable until a few hours before, almost seven years after the arrest on November 20, 2019, during which the prosecution built the case against the tycoon accused of being the mastermind, keeping him in preventive detention for over five years and 2 months before obtaining supervised release. For 44 days the prosecution presented witnesses, wiretaps, messages, phone data, and money movements before the jury.
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Evidence from which dozens of other corruption trials have arisen and which uncovered other cases. At the center Melvin Theuma, the intermediary pardoned in 2019, who indicated Fenech as the man who entrusted him 150,000 euros to organize the assassination. The defense needed much less: to open a crack in his reconstruction and have the defendant speak publicly for the first time since the arrest. Fenech took the witness stand and for four days directly pointed the finger at Keith Schembri, once his close friend and then very powerful chief of staff to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.
“The real mastermind was him,” he said pointing to Schembri, who has always denied any involvement and is not charged in the trial. The heir of the Tumas Group with a passion for secret companies in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, the one who “panicked” on February 22, 2017 when Daphne published the first post with the name “17 Black.” Those who killed her, the Degiorgio brothers who prepared, armed, and detonated the bomb with a detonator activated by a cell phone, said that already in 2015 there was a plot to kill Daphne, initiated by former finance minister Chris Cardona.
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