‘All Roads Lead To Keith’: The Defence’s Case In The Trial Against Yorgen Fenech

The defence closed its case in the trial of Yorgen Fenech with a two-day address built around a single phrase: l-id moħbija, the hidden hand.

Charles Mercieca told the jurors that the hand belonged to Keith Schembri, the former chief of staff at the Office of the Prime Minister. He said Schembri used and discarded a chain of people (Melvin Theuma, David Gatt, Keith Arnaud, Lawrence Cutajar, Johann Cremona, Kenneth Camilleri, Dr Adrian Vella and finally Fenech himself).

“All roads lead to Keith, and all bridges to Keith were burnt,” Mercieca said.

Schembri, who testified over three days in late July, denied any involvement in the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and has not been charged with the murder but has been charged with leaking information.

Mercieca opened by thanking the jurors for what he called 48 days “from the hotel to the trial and from the trial to the hotel”.

The bulk of the argument attacked Melvin Theuma, the confessed middleman who was granted a presidential pardon in November 2019 and whose evidence forms the spine of the bill of indictment.

Mercieca told the jurors that the pardon was unnecessary and that its real function was to fix a version of events. Theuma, he said, had already been caught running what Mercieca called the largest illegal lottery in Malta.

He listed what Theuma allegedly retained: a fleet of taxis, 20 properties, two promise-of-sale agreements, and the money paid to him for a government job.

A pardon, he reminded the jury, does not appear on a conduct certificate. “This man did all this dirt, and he has a clean conduct, like mine.”

Mercieca’s central factual argument was that the timeline does not work. The prosecution’s case, following Theuma, places the order for the killing in April 2017, at a meeting Theuma described at the Blue Elephant restaurant.

Mercieca told the jury that Fenech’s passport carries a US entry stamp dated 7th April, and that the SIM card used with the device was already in place in January 2017. Theuma never provided an exact date.

“If the bomb was in Malta before the order was given, what do Theuma’s accounts mean?” Mercieca said.

He told the jurors that Theuma was cross-examined for three days without a single question from the prosecution about the Blue Elephant meeting.

The investigation was, in his words, “botched”. The catalogue he put to the jury: Schembri’s “lost” phone, Daphne’s laptop, and the investigations into Schembri and Chris Cardona’s potential involvement.

Mercieca rejected the prosecution’s case that Fenech ordered the killing to protect 17 Black and ElectroGas, telling the jury that Caruana Galizia was writing about Egrant and about Schembri’s health at the same time.

He pointed to the six blog posts Caruana Galizia published about Schembri in November 2017, including one about an illness he was trying to keep private.

“She was not killed over something she was going to write,” he said, “but over what she had written.”

Mercieca ended on Thursday morning by inviting the jurors to substitute one name for another. “Change February, March, April, May, swap Yorgen for Keith Schembri, and see how much sense the story makes.”

He described his client as a man caught between three others, whom he named as Schembri, former police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar and Theuma.

He got in between the wolf and the devil, and he has paid bitterly.”

Schembri, he reminded the jury, had told the court that Theuma was the biggest liar in Malta. “Do you know why he said that? Because Keith Schembri knows the truth.”

He asked for a verdict of not guilty. The defence called three witnesses: 

John Abela (HR Support Services, OPM) 

He confirmed Schembri’s job description as chief of staff, and that Sandro Craus (head of government customer care) fell under the chief of staff. He confirmed that Castille has two entrances: the main door on Castille Square, used “generally by ministers, an ambassador”, and the St Paul Street entrance, where visitors are logged at reception with their details, time in, signature and time out. 

Under cross-examination, he confirmed there is no document setting out who may use which door.

Dr Rausi (Bank of Valletta) 

Rausi was called to give the transactions on Fenech’s Tumas Gaming Ltd Visa gold card in April 2017.

The prosecution objected that the documents were never exhibited; Gianella de Marco argued they were not new documents, and that the BOV representative has been on the defence witness list since 2020 

The Judge refused to let the witness answer at all, on the ground that she would be reading from documents rather than testifying from her own knowledge.

Dr Chris Frendo (head of legal, ElectroGas) 

Frendo gave the leak chronology. He joined in early July 2017. On 26 December 2017 he was called and found something that worried him: on 29 May 2017 someone with a password, working through the external IT administrator ICT Solutions Limited, had run keyword searches on Keith Schembri, Joseph Muscat, Turnville, Dubai, “passport”, Konrad Mizzi, Macbridge, 17 Black, Henley and Partners, Sai Mizzi and a “Chang” whose surname he could not recall. Operations director Catherine Halpin emailed the directors on 27 December 2017. 

The company terminated the IT contract, took the function in-house, notified counterparties of a possible leak, and filed a police report in April 2018 once fragments of emails began appearing in the media.

He denied there was any “aura of worry” at ElectroGas in 2017, said the only pressure was closing the financing, and said the deadlines moved. Still, operations and the Enemalta supply were unaffected.

The prosecution’s reply and the judge’s summing-up follow.