Daphne Caruana Galizia: There Are Crooks Everywhere You Look

The Island

Malta is the smallest country in the European Union. Its entire population — roughly half a million people — would fit into a medium-sized European city. Everyone knows everyone. Power is personal. The political class, the business class, the legal class, and the media class overlap to a degree that would be unimaginable in a larger country. Corruption on Malta does not operate in the shadows. It operates in plain sight, among people who see each other at restaurants, at church, at their children's schools.

Into this environment, in 2008, a woman named Daphne Caruana Galizia launched a blog. The blog, called Running Commentary, became the most-read publication in Malta — attracting over 400,000 page views regularly, more than the combined circulation of all the country's newspapers. In a country of half a million, that meant she was being read by nearly everyone who mattered.

She wrote about corruption, nepotism, patronage, money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organised crime, the country's controversial citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. She named names. She published documents. She made enemies of the most powerful people on an island small enough that making enemies of powerful people is personal and physical.

Politico named her one of 28 people shaping, shaking, and stirring Europe. They described her as "a one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta."

The Warnings

The threats against Daphne Caruana Galizia escalated over decades, and they were not subtle.

In 1996, the front door of her family home was set on fire. The family dog — a terrier named Zulu — had its throat slit and was laid across the doorstep. Later, a neighbour's car was burned in what was believed to be a misdirected attack on the Caruana Galizia family. In 2006, the house was set on fire again, this time while the family was asleep inside.

After she began blogging in 2008, her collie Rufus was found shot. Her terrier Zulu was poisoned. According to her son Matthew Caruana Galizia, threats were almost a daily occurrence — phone calls, letters, notes pinned to the front door, text messages, emails, and comments on the blog.

She was arrested in 2013 for breaking electoral silence the day before a general election after posting videos mocking Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. The policeman who booked her — Angelo Farrugia — had arrested her once before, when she was 18 years old, for participating in anti-government protests. Farrugia went on to become the Speaker of the Maltese Parliament.

The Panama Papers

Caruana Galizia's most consequential work began on February 22, 2016, when her blog reported that Maltese government minister Konrad Mizzi had connections to companies in Panama and New Zealand. Two days later, Mizzi was compelled to reveal the existence of a New Zealand-registered trust. On February 25, she revealed that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's chief of staff, Keith Schembri, owned a similar trust holding a Panama company.

The April 2016 Panama Papers leak confirmed her reporting. Mizzi owned a Panama company called Hearnville Inc. Mizzi and Schembri had created another company, Tillgate Inc. Both were connected through the same New Zealand trustees.

Her son Matthew was a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that coordinated the global Panama Papers investigation. Mother and son, working through different channels, were unravelling the same web.

In 2017, she alleged that yet another Panama company, Egrant, was owned by the wife of Prime Minister Muscat. The Prime Minister claimed the allegations were the reason he called a snap election. His Labour Party won. Caruana Galizia pointed out that the early election had already been planned.

The Lawfare

The legal assault on Caruana Galizia was as systematic as the physical threats.

At the time of her death, she was facing 47 libel suits — a number that, in a country of Malta's size, represented a coordinated effort to bankrupt her through legal costs. Chris Cardona, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Minister for the Economy, had obtained precautionary warrants freezing her assets to the tune of €50,000.

Pilatus Bank, whose connections to Maltese politicians she had investigated, sued her in an Arizona court for $40 million in damages. She was never formally notified of the lawsuit. It was withdrawn within hours of her murder.

Pilatus Bank had written to every non-government-aligned media outlet in Malta throughout 2017, threatening to sue them. The other outlets conceded and modified their content. Caruana Galizia did not. One media outlet later reported that threatening letters from the bank had been sent just twelve hours before she was killed.

October 16, 2017

At 2:35pm on October 16, 2017, Caruana Galizia published her last blog post. The title referenced Keith Schembri's court appearance. The post ended with the words: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate."

At approximately 3:00pm, she drove her rented Peugeot 108 away from her home in Bidnija. A car bomb detonated inside the vehicle, killing her. Debris was scattered across neighbouring fields. Her son Matthew heard the explosion from inside the family home and ran toward the wreckage.

She was 53 years old. She left behind her husband Peter and three sons.

The Reckoning

The murder of a journalist by car bomb in a European Union member state in 2017 produced shockwaves that extended far beyond Malta.

Three men were arrested in December 2017 in connection with the bombing. In November 2019, police arrested Yorgen Fenech — the owner of 17 Black, the Dubai-based company that Caruana Galizia had linked to Schembri and Mizzi in her Panama Papers reporting — on his yacht, in connection with the murder.

The arrests triggered a political crisis. Schembri, Mizzi, and cabinet minister Chris Cardona all resigned. Schembri was arrested. Crowds filled the streets of Valletta demanding Prime Minister Muscat's resignation. Muscat resigned in January 2020.

In March 2023, Fenech was found guilty of being an accomplice in Caruana Galizia's murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The court found that Fenech had commissioned the killing because Caruana Galizia's journalism threatened to expose his corrupt dealings with senior government figures.

A public inquiry concluded in 2021 that the Maltese state bore responsibility for Caruana Galizia's death — not because it ordered the killing, but because it had created an atmosphere of impunity in which the killing became possible. The inquiry found that the state had failed to protect her despite the known threats, had failed to recognise the risk to her life, and had failed to take adequate measures against money laundering and corruption.

The Daphne Project

In April 2018, six months after the murder, an international consortium of 45 journalists from 18 media organisations — including The Guardian, Reuters, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and La Repubblica — launched The Daphne Project. The project's purpose was to complete the investigative work that Caruana Galizia had been pursuing when she was killed.

The message to those who had ordered the car bomb was clear: killing the journalist had not killed the journalism. The investigations continued. The connections she had documented were verified. The corrupt structures she had exposed were dismantled.

The Daphne Project was one of the most powerful demonstrations of journalistic solidarity in modern history. It proved that the murder of a journalist can be made to backfire — that killing the messenger can amplify the message rather than silencing it.

The Questions That Remain

Malta has convicted the men who planted and detonated the bomb and the man who commissioned the murder. The Prime Minister whose office sheltered the corrupt officials Caruana Galizia investigated has resigned. A public inquiry has held the state responsible.

But the structural conditions that made the murder possible have not been fully addressed. Malta's defamation laws remain among the most plaintiff-friendly in Europe. The citizenship-by-investment scheme she investigated continues to operate. The island's position as a hub for online gambling, financial services, and cryptocurrency — industries where regulatory capture and political influence are endemic — has not fundamentally changed.

And the question that her final blog post raised — "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate" — has not been answered. The crooks she identified have been prosecuted. Whether the systems that produced them have been reformed is a different question, and the answer is less reassuring.

Daphne Caruana Galizia ran a blog from a small island in the Mediterranean. She had no institutional backing, no legal department, no corporate owner with deep pockets. She had a laptop, an accountancy-trained eye for financial irregularity, and the conviction that the people of Malta had a right to know how they were being governed.

For that, someone put a bomb in her car.

The 45 journalists who completed her work after her death understood something that her killers did not: journalism is not a person. It is a practice. You can kill the person. You cannot kill the practice. Not with a car bomb. Not with a lawsuit. Not with a dead dog on a doorstep.

The practice continues.