Doctor Adrian Vella walked jurors through a series of episodes with Yorgen Fenech before and after his arrest in connection with the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, describing Fenech’s cocaine use, the plans he and his brother made to leave Malta, and the notes Vella carried to him from Keith Schembri.

Vella, a doctor from St Paul’s Bay, had a longstanding relationship with the Fenechs. He had known Yorgen Fenech for 32 years and the wider family, including Fenech’s grandfather, father and children, for 38 years. He served as their GP.

“We were like family,” Vella said. They met, he said, but not frequently, mostly at occasions such as Christmas meals. “I wasn’t part of his clique of friends.”

Fenech introduced Vella to Keith Schembri around 2016, when Schembri was seriously ill and undergoing cancer treatment. Fenech and Vella travelled abroad with him more than once, including to England. Vella said he accompanied Schembri to chemotherapy sessions “not as a doctor but as a friend”. They spoke often, but “never politics”.

Escape plans: a cocaine-fuelled trip to Gozo

The prosecution took Vella back to 14 November 2019, the day Theuma was arrested. The following day, Friday 15 November, Fenech called Vella in the morning, saying he was not feeling well and wanted to rest.

“Mentally, Fenech wasn’t well or logical, as he was under the influence of cocaine,” Vella said. He had established that Fenech was using cocaine around a year earlier, when he carried out a urine test on him without his knowledge after noticing physical effects of the drug. The test came back positive.

Vella suggested they go together to his house in Gozo to take a break. He collected Fenech from his Portomaso home after work that afternoon.

“He was coked up… he wasn’t well… he was quiet, he wasn’t aggressive,” Vella said. He could not say whether Fenech was on cocaine at that moment or on a benzodiazepine to come down.

They stopped at Fenech’s office on the way, at Fenech’s request. Vella waited in the car and did not ask why they were going. Fenech was gone for five to ten minutes and came back down with a case, “like an airport one”. They then drove from Portomaso straight to Ċirkewwa without stopping, with very little conversation in the car.

Vella said he did not ask Fenech why he wanted to rest, and that he had to be careful what he said because Fenech was under the influence.

In the car, Fenech asked Vella for his mobile. He made around three calls, on the way, on arrival in Gozo, and while Vella was out buying him cigarettes. He did not say whom he was calling or what about, but he sounded angry. To Vella, this was consistent with cocaine use: someone on cocaine, he said, is one way one minute and incredibly aggressive the next.

At the house, nothing was said between them. Vella gave Fenech no medication, stayed less than an hour and left.

Vella was reminded that in his previous testimony he had said Fenech told him “I’m in the shit”. He was further reminded that he had told police that, on the way up to Gozo, Fenech spoke to Schembri and discussed a potential escape, with Schembri telling Fenech to act differently and not go to Dubai like his cousin [More Supermarkets’ Ryan Schembri]. He had also told police that Schembri specifically told him to prevent Fenech’s escape.

Vella had also told police that he had seen Fenech with a passport and an ID card, and had mentioned that he feared Fenech might escape “over the Daphne case”.

In each instance, he said he could not remember. The prosecution reminded him that he gave this statement just two weeks after the episodes.

“My memory isn’t good, I promise,” Vella said.

The next day, Saturday, Franco collected Vella and drove him back to Gozo. On the way, they discussed how to find Yorgen a lawyer. In his state, Vella said, “he was so unwell that he wasn’t even starting to realise he needed a lawyer”.

Vella was reluctant to confirm on the stand why Fenech needed a lawyer. 

Pressed, he said it was because “they were mentioning him in the Daphne case”. He said Fenech “could have done things he shouldn’t have”, and that he had begun to see the media and the public naming names.

“Yorgen looked dishevelled,” Vella said. He was usually “perfect”. When the two men raised the question of a lawyer, Fenech went at them. He did not want them interfering, and did not move from where he was.

Vella called around 15 lawyers. Some did not answer, it being a Saturday afternoon, and others refused outright “the moment I mentioned [Yorgen’s] name”. Nobody, he said, would touch it, and they would not help him either.

“I helped them. I helped a lot of people, and they used it against me,” Vella said, tears streaming down his face.

Franco and Yorgen then took his phone and began calling people Vella could not identify. “They then said they would handle it themselves. They told me to go outside,” he said, adding that he was sent off to water the plants. From the garden he heard a lot of shouting. “I was annoyed – after all that they told me, they didn’t trust me.”

“They were talking about rockets, helicopters, aeroplanes. I didn’t know what game they were playing. I was so angry – I went for my mobile, took it and left. And I didn’t see them again.”

He was reminded that, in previous statements, he had said Fenech and his brother had proposed escaping to Morocco, Mexico, France, Dubai and a host of other countries. He accepted that this had likely happened. “That was the state they were in – they were going around the world,” Vella said.

“[Yorgen Fenech] just wanted to leave. I told him a lot of things to calm him down,” Vella said when asked about Fenech’s plans to leave by air or by sea.

He put the pair’s behaviour down to cocaine, saying they went “from zero to a hundred in an hour”. He did not see anyone take anything that day. A fortnight later, cleaning the house, he found white powder on the floor.

He left at about 5pm, taking his phone and leaving his keys behind. Fenech’s driver returned them to him two or three weeks later.

Franco was meant to collect Vella again the next day. However, Franco did not answer when Vella called him. “I discovered that they were no longer in Gozo when I saw that Yorgen had been arrested on his boat,” Vella said.

Vella also said that a few days before the trip, Fenech’s brother Franco had contacted him, worried that Yorgen was unwell. The two of them had spent years worrying about him and trying to work out what to do, Vella said, attributing this to his drug use.

They had repeatedly tried to get him into rehab. Vella said he signed protocols for him to go on several occasions, “but that’s as far as he’d get”. Fenech would try, then cut off contact for months. 

Months before this, Vella said, Fenech had shut himself inside his home for months at a stretch and had stopped answering his calls. He wanted out of the house because he was starting to feel bad.

During 2019, Vella said, he did not see him at all and heard nothing of him. He knew he was depressed but never discussed what was behind it.

“I just didn’t want to raise the subject with him. If I did, it would ruin my credibility. What was I going to do – ask him if it was him? He had asked me to help him. I wanted to help him; if I did, I would have lost everything,” he said.

The notes between Schembri and Fenech

Vella confirmed that he was called twice to police headquarters after the arrest, with Fenech complaining of chest pains. On the first occasion, he saw no need to send him to hospital. On the second, he said he was not prepared to risk it and sent him to Mater Dei by ambulance, where an angiogram ruled out a heart attack.

Vella was then taken to 24th November, four days after Fenech’s arrest. At 8:30am, Keith Schembri called Vella for a whiskey at Vella’s place. A normal invite, Vella said, describing his relationship with Schembri as a doctor’s friendship.

About two hours later, he began receiving calls from numbers he did not recognise. After around four unanswered calls, a message came through saying “Yors”, Yorgen’s nickname. He called back. It was Fenech. “Go to Keith and collect something,” he told Vella. He did not say what. “He wasn’t agitated; he was calm.”

Vella insisted he never asked what he was collecting. He assumed that, since Fenech was at home, he was free. At Schembri’s house, the cleaner let him in. Schembri’s then-wife was there, and Schembri was in the shower as the couple were heading to an event in Girgenti. Schembri came halfway down the stairs, pointed towards a table next to Vella and said, “Those”.

“I took those papers. I didn’t see what was on them. They were facing down.” There were between four and six, Vella said, though he could not remember exactly. He folded them twice and put them in his jacket without reading them.

He was then shown the alleged notes, which detailed a plot to frame Chris Cardona for the murder. Vella said he had never seen them. The handwriting was not his, he said, and resembled Fenech’s.

Vella took the papers to Fenech’s Portomaso apartment. “I got the fright of my life. Half the depot was there.”

Fenech was in what Vella called the whiskey room, with his lawyer Gianluca Caruana Curran. “There were so many police there. I was scared. I just passed on the notes to Caruana Curran.”

Fenech got up and pulled the papers away before Caruana Curran could take them, Vella said, and could not read them. Vella asked him to read them out to him. Fenech told him absolutely not.

“If you asked me today what was in them, I would tell you I have no idea, I never looked,” Vella said.

“Yorgen took the note – went to another room, got some papers, and then started writing. He was speaking to himself, saying: it can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be. He wasn’t even reading; he was writing. He wasn’t right. I heard him say: if I go down, they go down with me.”

Fenech’s wife then came in to say she was leaving with the children. At that moment, Vella said, Fenech threw the papers aside and paid them no further attention.

Vella left at 12:30pm. He said he probably updated Schembri afterwards, on WhatsApp or Signal, telling him what had happened. He could not remember what Schembri said back.

At around 6pm he received a call from Caruana Curran asking him to come over so they could talk. The lawyer told him: “If you don’t come, there’s a chance [Yorgen] could get 30 years.” Vella asked him to call back in a quarter of an hour. He never did.

At 11pm, police came knocking at Vella’s door. He did not open it, assuming they had come for him over the paper he had passed to Fenech. He called Schembri at around 11:30pm to tell him police had come to arrest him, and Schembri told him to let them in. “I can’t remember what he told me,” he said.

It was at least 30 minutes before he opened the door. He was then taken to police headquarters and questioned by Keith Arnaud, Kurt Zahra and Lawrence Cutajar.

Vella was tearful at points on the stand – saying that his life has been ruined by affairs.