plotting a murder in a potato shed; Tens of thousands of euros were handed over in a brown envelope. The trial of Yorgen Fenech, the 44-year-old heir to a Maltese property empire, is filled with details of how the car-bomb murder of anti-corruption journalist Caruana Galizia was conceived and carried out. The start of proceedings this week in a Valletta courtroom is a development that many feared would never happen, after numerous delays and legal challenges.
Fenech was arrested on his yacht in 2019 as he tried to flee Malta after possibly being linked to a murder two years earlier.
Named in the indictment as the instigator of the plot, he faces charges of complicity in the murder and criminal association with criminals, making him the last of seven people to face trial over the murder that shook the country.
The attorney general is seeking life in prison on the murder charge and up to 30 years for the criminal association charge. Fenech rejected the allegations.
last minute move
The case came to a halt again just days before it was to start. In a petition filed with the Constitutional Court on 25 June, Fenech claimed that his right to a fair trial had been violated due to the alleged installation of a listening device in the prison meeting room where he spoke to his lawyers.
The court agreed to investigate his complaint but ultimately rejected his request to suspend the proceedings and proceeded with jury selection on July 1.
The process itself proved difficult due to concerns over the potential impact of intense media interest and its potential impact on the panel. It took five hours for both sides to agree on jurors, and officials had to intervene after a reserve juror fainted as the temperature climbed to 33 degrees Celsius.
Under Maltese law, jurors will be sequestered for the entire duration of the trial, housed in a hotel and banned from phones, computers or smartwatches.
What prosecutors allege and are seeking
At the time of her death, Caruana was investigating a controversial power station deal involving Galizia Fenech, and it later emerged that he was the owner of a secret offshore company, “17 Black”, which she was also investigating.
According to the indictment, Fenech first contacted his friend, taxi driver Melvin Theuma, to seek out Caruana Galizia, whom he feared was about to publish damaging revelations about him and his uncle.
Theuma then contacted brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio and agreed a fee of €150,000, which he says he received in cash inside a brown envelope from Fenech. Theuma later received a presidential pardon in exchange for his testimony against Fenech and has been living under the witness protection program since 2019.
In June 2025, Robert Agius and Jamie Vella, accused of supplying explosives, were sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. The Degiorgio brothers are serving a 40-year sentence for planting and detonating the bomb, and accomplice Vincent Muscat is serving a 15-year sentence.
The public holds the government accountable
Caruana Galizia had spent years exposing corruption at the highest levels of Malta’s politics and business, and her murder sparked international outrage, shining a spotlight on the rule of law in the EU’s smallest member state.
The scandal ultimately forced then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to resign amid mass protests in January 2020, accusing him of shielding his colleagues from investigation. A 2021 public inquiry found that the government bears responsibility for fostering “a state of impunity”, in which Caruana Galizia’s killers believed they could murder her and get away with it.
Caruana Galizia’s husband, her three sons and two sisters are attending the Fenech proceedings, as they have in previous trials.
On Friday, her younger sister Mandy Mallia posted on social media about the pain of listening to an alleged recording of Fenech saying that Caruana Galizia should not have survived the attack at all and that her mother would die before all the perpetrators were brought to justice.
“Justice for Daphne can’t come soon enough,” Mallia wrote. “Malta must move forward.”
The trial is expected to last for several weeks.
Edited by: Andreas Illmer