The declarations, covering 29 Labour and 23 Nationalist MPs, show a stark spending divide between the two parties. PL candidates declared €571,877 among them, an average of €20,424 each, while PN candidates declared €162,857, an average of €7,081.

In total, Labour candidates outspent their Nationalist counterparts by three and a half to one.

The gap is starkest at the top of the table. The fourteen highest spenders are all Labour candidates, eleven of whom declared over €26,000. The highest-spending Nationalist MP, Beppe Galea, ranks fifteenth at €17,368.

At the other end of the scale, Prime Minister Robert Abela and Opposition leader Alex Borg declared no campaign expenditure at all. Party spending falls outside the individual candidate cap, and Amphora Media has already reported how most donations to political parties remain undisclosed to voters.

Minister Joe Etienne Abela, the highest spender, did not declare the source of his funds. He was one of 35 MPs (including PM Robert Abela and Alex Borg)  who listed no donors in their campaigns – a combined €454,216.53 in spending with no declared donors.

The ten largest sums with no declared donors belonged to Cabinet members: Ministers Jo Etienne Abela, Chris Bonett, Keith Azzopardi Tanti, Jonathan Attard, Miriam Dalli, Silvio Schembri, Byron Camilleri, Clint Camilleri, Malcolm Agius Galea and PS Alison Zerafa Civelli. The spend ranged from €16,578 to €38,940.

Under the Electoral Commission’s 2026 guidance, a candidate cannot spend more than €20,000 for each district contested. Since the cap applies per district, a candidate contesting two districts has an effective ceiling of €40,000.

Five candidates declared totals within €1,800 of that two-district ceiling. Abela was followed by Ian Borg at €39,680, Rosianne Cutajar at €39,448.11, Christian Paul Bonett at €38,629.88 and Keith Azzopardi Tanti at €38,200.

What the declarations reveal

Beyond the headline figures, the declarations offer a rare glimpse into the donors who fund campaigns.

Justice Minister Owen Bonnici filed the most extensively itemised donor list, naming nine sources. These included €10,000 each from “Family Abela” and “Family Felice” and €2,000 from “Family Mangion”, while one donor’s name was illegible on the form itself.

Rosianne Cutajar received €18,000 in donations for ‘food and beverages’ and ‘sound and audiovisual’ from Daniel Farrugia, her partner. Her declared total of €39,448.11 places her just over €500 below the two-district ceiling.

Ian Borg declared funds raised through “friends of candidate” coffee mornings and small gatherings at venues including Villa Arrigo and Xara Lodges. He also listed donations as “each under €500” – meaning they remain anonymous.

Where the money went

Hire costs were the single largest expense category across all candidates, at €204,979. But close behind was “other miscellaneous expenses” at €191,621, meaning roughly a quarter of all declared campaign spending sits under a catch-all label with no further breakdown. For example, “other miscellaneous” accounted for €20,637.63 of Minister Abela’s total.

Printing (€102,248) and advertising (€100,952) accounted for a further €200,000 between them, followed by postage (€50,464), personal expenses (€36,749), stationery (€34,446) and travel (€9,992). Over the years, political parties spent hundreds of thousands to advertise on Meta. Many candidates defied Meta’s recent political advertising ban, running short-lived ads.

The dataset covers only the 52 elected candidates, not the full field of candidates who contested the election, and fewer than the full complement of MPs. Data for other candidates was not provided. All figures are as declared by the candidates.

You can find more political finance data on Open Malta.

“I am not the mastermind,” the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said, telling the court he was “600 million per cent” certain he had no connection to Caruana Galizia’s killing or to the men accused of carrying it out.

Asked why he thought Fenech had named him, Schembri said Fenech knew him inside out and that it had been the easiest way out. He said the allegation had cost him his business and his banking relationships.

“I will never forget the friendship I had with him,” he said.

The denial came at the close of a long cross-examination by Giannella de Marco, who appears for Yorgen Fenech. Fenech, who is accused of commissioning the October 2017 car bomb that killed the journalist, has alleged that the murder originated with Schembri. Schembri is not charged in connection with the murder and has consistently denied any role in it. He is charged with leaking information on the case.

The missing phone

De Marco returned repeatedly to Schembri’s mobile phone, which has never been recovered.

Schembri said that on the morning of his arrest he received a call at 5:03am from Dr Adrian Vella, his and Fenech’s personal doctor, who told him people were knocking at his door. Asked why he assumed these were police officers, Schembri said it was obvious to him, because he had been told that Fenech had turned his statement against him.

De Marco put it to him that this account could not stand, because Vella had been arrested at 12:30am. Schembri did not identify who had informed him. Pressed on whether the police commissioner or the officers leading the investigation had tipped him off, he said he did not remember and insisted he had no close relationship with then commissioner Lawrence Cutajar.

Schembri said he had resigned shortly before officers came for him, and that Muscat had told him he was doing the right thing.

He told the court that workmen were at his house that morning, both moving furniture indoors and working near the pool, and suggested one of them might have taken the phone. De Marco noted that this account had not appeared in his statements or earlier testimony, that neither investigators nor scene-of-crime officers had recorded workers inside the house, and that photographs showed no works under way.

“I was going through a trauma at the time, from chief of staff to being arrested,” Schembri said. “To this day, I still don’t know where it is.”

The note passed to his doctor

De Marco pressed Schembri on the note that Adrian Vella is alleged to have carried from Schembri’s home to Fenech.

Schembri denied handing over any paper. He said he had told Vella to “go upstairs, there are some papers, take what you want,” and that Vella had taken it himself. He said no fingerprints of his were found on the document, and that he had never seen it before. He added that he could not go further because he had been instructed not to refer to the first pardon request.

De Marco put to him that Vella, who was accustomed to reading Schembri’s blood test results, would have been able to tell a set of test results from a handwritten note. Schembri maintained he had not touched the paper.

Theuma, Camilleri and Cremona

Schembri repeated that he did not know Melvin Theuma and had met him only when Theuma came to Castille, where he said he passed him on to the head of HR, Sandro Craus, after Theuma asked him for a job. He denied giving Theuma a tour of the building and denied ever asking him to kill Caruana Galizia.

On Kenneth Camilleri, the former security officer who has testified about being sent to keep Theuma calm, Schembri said Camilleri bore a grudge against him because he had once threatened to sack him for carrying weapons into Castille. Asked why he had never raised this before, he replied: “Why did I need to say it?”

De Marco put Camilleri’s and Johann Cremona’s accounts to him in turn. 

Schembri said both were lying. Asked in sequence about scene-of-crime officers, Camilleri, Cremona, Theuma, Adrian Vella and the journalist Saviour Balzan, he maintained that each had either lied or was mistaken.

The defence also produced screenshots of Schembri’s call log showing a contact saved as “Rukkell,” which the court has heard belongs to Camilleri, with an answered incoming call at 12:12. The court noted that the date of the screenshot cannot be established from the metadata, which records only when the image was accessed.

David Gatt and the August 2017 calls

Schembri said former police inspector and lawyer David Gatt had lobbied him to be made ambassador to Israel, and described an incident in which he returned to his office to find Gatt undressed, saying he had done so to show he had nothing to hide. Schembri said he told him to get dressed and leave, and that investigators had advised him to steer clear of Gatt.

De Marco put call and location data to him showing that Gatt and Schembri were in the same antenna area on the morning of 16 August 2017, that they spoke at 11:40am, and that Schembri called Gatt again at 5pm. 

Schembri said the calls concerned the Israeli ambassador and that he could not explain calls Gatt made afterwards. Dr Martin Bajada, assisting the court, took the jury through the call logs.

“Lorry told me Keith there’s nothing”

The defence exhibited a chat between Schembri and Muscat, marked KS2, in which Muscat asks which recording is in question and Schembri replies that it is not the one mentioned in court, that the story is invented, and that “Lorry” had told him there was nothing but that he would keep checking.

Schembri confirmed that “Lorry” was Lawrence Cutajar and that “there’s nothing” referred to material concerning himself. De Marco pointed out that he had already resigned by then, and asked why, if he was certain he had never spoken to Theuma, he was asking the police commissioner whether recordings mentioning him existed. Schembri said he could not explain the message because too much time had passed.

The paper on the Castille desk

De Marco produced a handwritten sheet recovered during the search of Schembri’s Castille office, visible in the search video. It carried a reference to Caruana Galizia’s blog dated 31 October 2016, an arrow, and the initials “PD,” alongside the date of the murder and the date of the Degiorgio brothers’ arrest.

Schembri first accepted the handwriting as his, then, on closer inspection, said only the initials “DCG” were his. He said the notes related to reports in the Italian media suggesting the murder was connected to diesel smuggling, and that he had passed that material to Saviour Balzan, with whom he said he shared stories. 

Balzan has told the court that Schembri confided the story to him; Schembri said Balzan was wrong, because the material had already appeared internationally.

Daphne’s writing about him

Asked whether Caruana Galizia had crossed a line when she wrote about his cancer diagnosis, Schembri said she had not done so with him, but had with his family and children. He said he had filed libel suits against her, which he believed concerned 17 Black, and had withdrawn them after her death.

He told the court he had developed a political thick skin and that his family had not, and said he asks his mother to pray for Caruana Galizia before he goes to sleep.

De Marco also returned to his earlier evidence that people from abroad had asked him why he had not got rid of the journalist. Schembri said these were investors from the Middle East, accustomed to a different environment, and that he had replied: “What, do we kill people like that?”

The trial continues.

He also claimed that Mercieca and Gianluca Caruana Curran, another defence lawyer, met Keith Schembri the night before the former OPM chief of staff testified in the compilation of evidence against Fenech.

“You want to laugh? I’ll show you,” he said as he unfolded a paper from his pocket. It showed a screenshot Schembri sent, showing Mercieca sending Schembri a selfie. “All while his client is in prison,” he added.

The photo was a selfie of Mercieca with his ex-partner’s uncle with the message “awguri”.

“He’s taking the piss out of his client. They even paid people in the media to shit on me.”

“The note has been in my pocket the whole time during the trial. Also, if you want to know, Gianluca Caruana Curran went to go meet Keith Schembri at his office in Floriana near the Turkish embassy,” he said.

“The defence want to destroy me, weaken my testimony.”

The incident came after Gianella de Marco was asking him questions on communications with Kenneth Cammileri. Mercieca laughed at his response, and it triggered the massive response from Cremona.

“They destroyed me. Everything. You think you’re so smart,” he told them.

Judge Edwina Grima took the incident seriously, trying to calm down the combative interaction between the witness and the defence. She paused his testimony, and Cremona was sent home.

Earlier, questioning focused on the relationship between Cremona, Schembri and the OPM security official.

Messages were shown in court where GDM tried to imply they were close friends, even a “team” and coordinated their testimonies.

“We wouldn’t be called to testify – because Arnaud wants [Theuma’s] mother,” he told Schembri in a message. 

“I didn’t like Arnaud. The way he acted with me wasn’t great,” Cremona explained in court. 

“How could I coordinate testimony when I didn’t even know that there were recordings of what I said?”

“I hoped Keith would help me. He was mentioned in everything”

The following communication, which was shown and has been blocked from publication pending further testimony, fueled the outburst.

The court noted at the outset that Brincat has pending legal proceedings against him on an unrelated matter, and that he could decline to answer questions touching on them.

“He came to tell me that Vince Muscat was speaking to police. He told me he was involved in the murder. I was shocked. He started crying, going crazy. I kept on asking him: what did you do?” Brincat explained.

“Melvin told me that Yorgen told him il-Kohhu was speaking. He told me he was the middleman, who passed on the money and found the killers for Yorgen.”

“As far as I know, Melvin got the money from Yorgen. Melvin told me he got nothing from it.”

Brincat, a car dealer and horse-racing bookmaker, has known Theuma since Theuma was as young as 16 or 17. Theuma was one of around four people who helped Brincat at the bookmaker, and also helped him with the horses and, on one occasion, a car imported from Japan.

“Our relationship was good. We were friends in every sense of the word,” he said.

“Before the murder, he was normal, jokey. After, he would find me five times a day. I used to find him outside my door. He wasn’t behaving normally; he would show me articles and ask me about them,” Brincat said. Prompted with his earlier testimony, Brincat confirmed that Theuma had suicidal thoughts during this period.

Fenech and Theuma, he said, were also good friends, with Theuma telling him he sometimes travelled abroad with Fenech.

Asked by the judge why Theuma passed the money to the Degiorgios, Brincat said Theuma told him it was “to make a bomb”. “To carry out a killing,” the judge put to him. “That’s what it amounts to,” Brincat replied.

Brincat told jurors that Theuma spoke of €150,000 passed from Fenech to the Degiorgios – he believed after the murder – as well as weekly sums which Theuma said he paid out of his own pocket to a member of the Degiorgio family. Brincat said he believed these payments were made so they would not expose him.

“Melvin wanted to go to the police and get a pardon. He told me he had started recording Fenech. He knew whoever spoke first would get a pardon.”

Brincat also recounted that Theuma told him Fenech had said Muscat’s pardon request “had already gone through Cabinet” – something which, Brincat testified, made him realise that such information could not circulate through Cabinet without people knowing.

Brincat told jurors that he tried to dissuade Theuma from going to the police.

“I told him not to go. The people he was dealing with, like Yorgen, had contacts with big people. Everyone in Malta knows. I didn’t think police would believe him. I didn’t even believe that he had these tapes – and he’s just inventing things so I stop convincing him not to go,” he told jurors.

Brincat said he also advised Theuma to say Fenech’s name aloud while recording him, so that anyone listening to the tapes – including the police – would know who was speaking.

Brincat also corroborated the ‘phantom job’ story – and that Fenech had told Theuma to go to Castille to secure the job.

“Theuma used to get money from Yorgen. One time, he couldn’t get hold of Fenech and said he was going to go to Castille. I asked him whether he had spoken to Keith Schembri. He mentioned that Schembri was involved in some way, but also said he never spoke to Schembri himself. I thought he was crazy. He even told me he wanted to go speak to the Archbishop.”

“Melvin always told me that Fenech mentioned Schembri, so he assumed he was involved. He never spoke to Schembri about the murder or about money. I told him he shouldn’t go to Keith as he would get arrested straight away.”

Asked, at the close of the prosecution’s examination, who commissioned and paid for Theuma to act as the broker so that the murder would be carried out, Brincat answered: “It is Yorgen Fenech, from what Melvin told me.”

Edwin Brincat and Lawrence Cutajar: Meetings And Calls

A key highlight of Brincat’s testimony was his interactions with former Police Commissioner Lawrence Cutajar – whom Brincat had saved in his phone as ‘MRC’, for Marsa Racing Club.

The number of times the two met was itself a point of contention. Brincat initially described two meetings before Theuma’s arrest, but under cross-examination conceded there may have been two more: one in which he delivered a car battery to Cutajar’s home, and another in which Cutajar checked whether Brincat had obtained the information he wanted.

The first meeting, Brincat said, was held at Cutajar’s home by him e to complain about a wrongly issued citation for a car he was not driving. At that meeting, Cutajar told Brincat words to the effect of: “If I help you with this, you’ll need to help me with something.”

Brincat testified that Cutajar told him he already knew Theuma was involved in the Caruana Galizia case, that Theuma had recordings, and asked Brincat to find out from Theuma where the tapes were kept, promising that not even Theuma would know Brincat had told them.

Brincat told him: “I knew nothing. I was holding Melvin back from the police. If I didn’t want him to have anything to do with the police, do you think I was going to pass the tapes on to the Commissioner?”

The prosecution played an intercept of a conversation between Brincat and Cutajar in court. It was taken on 14th June, the day before Brincat testified in the compilation of evidence in the case.

Details of the intercept will be revealed after Cutajar testifies.

The prosecution also presented a WhatsApp conversation between the pair. The first message, which included a photo of Brincat’s fine, was sent on Thursday 17th October 2019. The issue around the fine was settled on 23rd October.

On Saturday 9 November, 9th Novembermessaged Brincat to see if he was alone and available for a call in five minutes. This was followed by a series of further messages on Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 Novembe13th Novemberng a potential 5 pm meeting. Brincat said he ignored those requests for calls and meetings, explaining he was trying to avoid Cutajar precisely because of the tapes.

On Thursday 14th November, Brincat was arrested as part of the money laundering investigation. Brincat insisted that they were not informed about the arrest in advance.

Yorgen Fenech’s defence team focused on Brincat’s relationship with Cutajar. The defence referred to a recording between Johann Cremona and Melvin Theuma in which the pair discussed Brincat paying €15,000 to secure Theuma’s pardon and telling Cutajar to go on a cruise.

Brincat denied that any such payment ever took place. He told the court that when he confronted Theuma about the claim, Theuma admitted it was a lie. “Melvin told me he just said it to show he had power and connections, even if it wasn’t the case,” he said.

“I knew there were these tapes. I never knew what was in them,” he said, adding that when Theuma played him a USB of the recordings at his home, the audio was largely inaudible, and he told Theuma the police would have the equipment to decipher it.

It was also put to Brincat that he had coached Theuma’s police statement before his arrest and helped him write a letter to Fenech and Schembri, both of which he denied, saying he had only told Theuma that police would play him the tapes and he should answer according to them.

Brincat also faced questions on Theuma’s pardon. He said he feared Theuma would never get one – and that Fenech and Schembri’s influence would see the murder pinned on Theuma instead. “They are powerful people. You don’t know what contacts they have,” he said.

However, Brincat regularly stressed that while Theuma had got it into his head that Fenech and Schembri acted as one, Theuma had always told him that he never dealt or spoke with Schembri about the murder itself – and only believed Schembri was the source of information Fenech passed on from the investigation.

Details of the alleged 2015 plot to murder journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia were the focus of convicted hitman Vince Muscat’s cross-examination by Yorgen Fenech’s defence team. 

This came after the Attorney General’s office concluded its questioning, with today’s testimony focusing on Muscat’s life in prison after his arrest for the murder and his attempt to secure a pardon for information on Daphne’s murder.

The Bomb: Built to Kill And Maximise Harm 

Muscat also testified on the bomb, which he says was also attached to a petrol container to maximise damage. He said he overheard George Degiorgio tell Jamie Vella and Robert Agius that the bomb should not be like the one used on Romeo Bone, who survived with both legs severed.

“George wanted her gone, not just injured,” Muscat told jurors.

He described the device being placed inside the car on the passenger side, pushed under the driver’s seat against the side to maximise the blast; corroborating the pathologist’s contained-blast, back-to-front findings from last week.

The bomb, Muscat said, was supplied by Robert Agius and Jamie Vella, brought from abroad by catamaran from Sicily, at no cost he was aware of.

The 2017 plot, the alleged Cardona visits:

Muscat confirmed knowing Melvin Theuma for years from Ħamrun’s illegal lotto scene, and that he was associated with Edgar il-Gojja’ Brincat, but would not confirm de Marco’s suggestions of drug dealing.

He accepted he drove Alfred to Cardona “as many as 5 times before the killing”, but resisted the framing that these were to advance the plot.

“We went for information, not about the murder,” Muscat said.

Alfred, he said, told him Cardona “might give us some detail or help” locating Caruana Galizia during a spell when they had lost sight of her.

Muscat told the court he believed Cardona was receiving information from “Mr Valletta”, hedged as “I think, Silvio V”, an account he stressed came entirely from Alfred Degiorgio. 

In earlier sworn testimony read back to him in court, he had identified lawyer Edward Gatt as the intermediary between Cardona and Valletta.

In prior testimony also read back to him, Muscat had described Anthony Toni l-Iblah’ Sammut coming to the potato shed “in Cardona’s name” after the killing and sitting with Alfred for an hour or more at a time. M

Muscat confirmed the meetings happened and were concerned “something related to the killing”, and that they once drove to Fgura looking for him, but said he could not place them before or after the murder.

Muscat confirmed that after the murder David Gatt would come to the potato shed and make a “number 1” gesture, and that George explained it referred not to Cardona but to Keith Schembri: “the number 1 of Malta”, as Muscat put it, later softening this to how he personally saw Schembri: “we’d say how capable he is, a man of business”.

Muscat confirmed that in the days leading up to his December 2019 arrest, he and Alfred went looking for Cardona. They did not have his contact number, so went to a bar in Siġġiewi. He confirmed going to look for Cardona “for help”, and to having seen Cardona and Gatt there before the killing, but not on that day. 

Prior testimony read back to him suggested Alfred feared Cardona was about to leave the country; Muscat said he remembered “something similar”.

De Marco asked Muscat whether Schembri had allegedly told them to “keep their heads up” when arrested. Muscat said he remembered “something like that” from the Degiorgio brothers but could not recall it being attributed to Schembri.

“After that, we felt we had power,” Muscat said.

Testimony read back to Muscat also included the claim that the group knew in advance that George would be arrested and Muscat would not. Muscat said he could not remember this.

De Marco then put it directly to Muscat that his memory was failing selectively: “It worries me that whatever concerns Keith Schembri, you’re forgetting.” 

Muscat denied having any reason to forget, telling the court he had never himself said Schembri was involved – only that George had told him the “number 1” gesture was “not for Cardona but for Schembri”.

The 2015 plot and David Gatt’s role. 

Under questioning, Muscat confirmed that the 2015 hitmen were himself, George Degiorgio and Jamie Vella. Alfred Degiorgio, Muscat explained, was in prison at the time.

Muscat confirmed again that George told him four people wanted Caruana Galizia dead, naming Michael Cassar and Cardona among them; the other two he could not recall.

David Gatt, he said, acted as the middleman between the hitmen and Cardona. Muscat explained that they pressed Gatt for the 50,000 euro deposit to commit the murder, but it never came.

He described the 2015 plan in detail: a shooting, Jamie Vella firing a machine gun from a van door, and George the driver. He detailed how George began sending WhatsApp messages to Caruana Galizia, posing as a source with information. She rebuffed those advances and asked for a face-to-face meeting. He said they also followed her to her workplace.

Prison Money 

At the start of the day, Muscat spoke about his time in prison in the aftermath of his arrest in connection with the murder. 

Muscat described €200-€300 a week reaching him in prison, collected at the Marsa club and routed to his partner via her father, Peter Brincat. The money was paid by Lawrence’s ‘ Il-Lorry ‘ Pace. 

Separately, he said Robert Agius (tal-Maksar) and Jamie Vella approached Peter Brincat at a Marsa shop offering €1,500 a month for his silence; an offer refused, and one from which Muscat says he received nothing.

Turning to police

Muscat said he approached Keith Arnaud around early 2019, at the urging of his lawyer, Arthur Azzopardi, in hopes of a pardon. George confronted him in prison soon after, telling him he had been informed that he was talking and that it came from Melvin Theuma. 

Muscat testified he then feared for his family, namely an acid attack on his children, and, strikingly, in Arnaud’s office his own pardon lawyer, Azzopardi, pressed him to “invent” a false account implicating Theuma.

Under questioning from the defence, Muscat confirmed that Azzopardi asked him to change his story.

“I told Arnaud: As far as I know, Melvin Theuma was involved,” Muscat said.

He said Azzopardi was also representing Robert Agius at the time. Muscat maintained that he had only ever known Theuma as the source of the money, not Cardona or anyone else.

He said Azzopardi stopped representing him soon after. Azzopardi told him he was receiving threats, couldn’t sleep, and that the threats extended to Muscat’s children. 

A year-long investigation by The Guardian has cast fresh scrutiny on Julie Meyer, the American entrepreneur once feted as the “queen” of London’s dotcom boom, detailing a short-lived but turbulent Maltese venture that drew in the prime minister, stiffed local suppliers and ended with a magistrate ordering police to track her down.

Meyer arrived in Malta in the summer of 2017, installing herself in a suite at the five-star Westin Dragonara in St Julian’s and turning the hotel’s top-floor business centre into a temporary office.

Fresh from the collapse of her London firm, Ariadne Capital, which had gone into administration owing hundreds of thousands of pounds to staff, the tax office and creditors, she acquired a Maltese company licensed to manage investments and rebranded it Ariadne Capital Malta. Within weeks, she was telling the press she would raise a €1 billion European fund.

To generate momentum, Meyer convened a summit at the Dragonara, gathering startups and investors from across Europe. The then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat spoke at the event, and afterwards Meyer held court on the terrace as potential backers circled. The event looked like a triumph. Behind the scenes, The Guardian reports, the bills were already going unpaid.

Among those left out of pocket was Mark Lightfoot, whose design agency had been hired for the summit. He says he was owed €60,000. According to the investigation, Meyer first blamed technical issues, then offered to settle for half. When Lightfoot pressed and won a court order freezing her bank accounts, he says she hit back with a threatening email warning that “the entire Lightweight [sic] clan” faced “a multi-generational destruction of wealth” unless he backed off, adding: “I am so totally not joking.” Lightfoot dropped the claim, reasoning that even a favourable ruling was no guarantee of payment. Meyer has previously rejected such allegations, telling City AM in 2022 that she did not remember him and insisting: “We always pay people their salaries.”

The most cinematic episode came in November 2017, when, according to sources, a large hotel bill remained unsettled. In the early hours, the Dragonara’s night manager knocked on the door of suite 514, a police officer at his side.

Meyer was not there, but her two personal assistants were, having spent the evening packing on her instructions. The Guardian reports that Meyer had emailed them a room plan directing them to take shoes, expensive clothes and “the princess crown in the safe,” while avoiding anything that might “raise alarm that we’re doing a runner, and I’m fleeing the country.” The assistants stuck to the script, reassured the officer and left. One recalled the journey home: “I felt like everyone was watching us… Let’s just get out of this country as soon as possible.”

Even then, Meyer did not give up on the island. In February 2018, she messaged her staff WhatsApp group — named “Inner Circle” — describing a “major pivotal transaction” moving Ariadne’s assets out of the UK. “I AM NOT BLOND,” she declared, calling the restructuring “all legitimate… Nothing in London. Everything in Malta. Julie 1, universe 0.”

The Maltese authorities took a different view. Non-payment of wages is a criminal offence in Malta, and the state brought several cases to court. After Meyer failed to appear at a hearing in April 2018, a magistrate ordered the police commissioner to locate her within 48 hours, using all available resources. By May, the Malta Financial Services Authority had suspended Ariadne’s fund-management licence. Less than a year after its lavish debut, the Mediterranean adventure was over. Lawyers in Malta have since confirmed the criminal cases were closed.

Malta was one stop on a longer trail. The Guardian’s investigation, by Olivia Lee and Juliette Garsidem followed Meyer from London to Switzerland and Greece, documenting 17 legal claims against her and her companies and allegations from founders who say investment money vanished. A UK Financial Conduct Authority inquiry, codenamed Operation Hibbing, ran for five years before closing in 2023 citing insufficient evidence for criminal charges. The University of Warwick has annulled her honorary doctorate, and her MBE was withdrawn last summer, though she still styles herself “Dr Julie Meyer MBE” online.

Meyer did not respond to The Guardian’s requests for comment and has previously denied that her activities were anything but above board. Approached near her Zurich flat in January, she told reporters they had the wrong person: “I’m not who you think I am… I’m not Julie Meyer.”

A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided at least $40 billion in taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign jurisdictions such as Malta, Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands. Amphora Media contributed to the research.

The investigation, which focuses on the impact of the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from a global effort to curb offshore tax avoidance by multinational companies. Offshore tax strategies don’t necessarily break any laws in the US, but experts who spoke to the NYT said it had gone too far.

“A favourite destination was the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, where Abbott Laboratories, the pharmaceutical giant, has claimed all its global profits were earned by a subsidiary with no employees. Malta helped the company cut its tax bill by $336 million last year, the filings show,” the NYT article reads.

“Abbott made Malta the final destination of a cat-and-mouse game to stay one step ahead of tax authorities. In 2023, the drugmaker created a subsidiary in Bermuda, which had no corporate income tax. But Bermuda enacted one to comply with the O.E.C.D., which was scheduled to take effect in January 2025.”

“On Dec. 19, 2024, 13 days before the new Bermuda law kicked in, Abbott shifted the tax residency of the subsidiary to Malta, filings show. In 2024, the Abbott unit reported $17 billion in net income — more than its total global profit — and no income taxes anywhere.” 

“Malta helped Abbott cut its tax bill by nearly 20 per cent last year, filings show. The documents also disclose the number of employees at the Malta entity: zero. “

The US Internal Revenue Service is now challenging more than $1 billion of Abbott’s savings, U.S. Tax Court filings show. As part of that dispute, the agency contends that a transaction generating $8 billion of deductions to shield profit from the U.S. minimum offshore tax was abusive and lacked economic substance.

Abbott is far from alone in choosing Malta. According to the NYT, Thermo Fisher Scientific, the scientific equipment maker, used the island to cut its taxes by $3.5 billion last year

S&P Global, the ratings company, trimmed its bill by $269 million through Maltese subsidiaries. Yum Brands, owner of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, saved $121 million. Crocs, the shoemaker, saved $47 million by using Malta, where the company has no offices.

The International Tax Observatory, a research group at the Paris School of Economics, says profits allocated by U.S. companies to Malta soared to $5.6 billion in 2022 from $134 million in 2017.

In 2021, the Biden administration said it would join an effort coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to impose a minimum corporate income tax of 15 per cent. 

That levy applies on a country-by-country basis, avoiding the blending loophole and reducing the incentive to shift income into tax havens. Dozens of nations signed on, including most European Union members, Japan, Britain and Australia.

In 2022, the European Union issued a directive permitting a handful of countries, including Malta, to delay carrying out the 15 per cent minimum tax. That tax in Malta will not kick in until the end of 2029.

Third parties and independents took 10,689 votes in the general election, or 3.55% of the total, a marginal rise on the 3.15% they collected in 2022, and almost double the 1.29% recorded in 2017. 

Momentum, launched and led by long-standing candidate Arnold Cassola, was the best-performing third party at its first attempt, taking 1.54% of the vote. 

Cassola himself did the heavy lifting. He pulled 795 first-count votes in the 10th district, nearly double the 427 he scored there previously, and another 722 in the 9th. Mark Philip Camilleri Gambin also performed well in the 11th district, receiving 532 first-count votes.

It’s reflected in the overall district results. Momentum performed best on the 10th district (3.66%), 9th (3.16%), and 11th (2.35%), 

That result runs counter to the trajectory of ADPD, Malta’s longest-running third party. ADPD slipped from 1.61% in 2022 to 1.31% in 2026, losing about 750 votes, and ceding its position as the largest third-party. Leader Sandra Gauci announced she would step back from politics following the result.

Gauci was the third-best-performing third-party candidate, receiving 513 first-count votes in the 12th district and 455 first-count votes in the 6th.

Further down, Aħwa Maltin edged up to 0.60% (from 0.52% in 2022). Imperium Europa managed just 167 votes, only six more than the combined total of every independent candidate in the country.

Third parties ran a meaningful share of candidates this year. Of the 162 people on the ballot, just over 14% came from third parties. With eight candidates, ADPD had the largest representation, followed by Momentum and Aħwa Maltin with seven candidates each.

Yet representation on the ballot does not translate into a level contest. Third parties navigate an obstacle course of historical loyalties, a lack of media infrastructures for propaganda and donation marathons, and an Electoral Commission that supports the duopoly.

The Electoral Commission counts votes, publishes election results and campaign expenses, reviews electoral division boundaries, and can initiate suspending an election if it alleges illegal or corrupt practices. 

Under Malta’s decades-long political duopoly, the rule that the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition propose their members effectively means that only the dominant parties can significantly influence the institution’s make-up.

ADPD’s chairperson, Sandra Gauci, told Amphora Media that her party had to “fight tooth and nail” to get access to real-time voting counts through the Electoral Commission’s laptops. Momentum’s chairperson, Arnold Cassola, too, pointed out that PL and PN members received voting updates every five minutes, while smaller parties are excluded from the process.

That leaves a handful of seats to decide the shape of the result, and this year there is an extra variable: the relocation of more than 24,000 voters has redrawn the battle lines in several key districts.

Gozo: the 13th District & key battleground

The 13th District, which covers the island of Gozo, is one of the most tightly contested districts, even though it tilted more towards the PL in 2022 (53.5%).

It will be a marquee contest on election day. PN leader Alex Borg is a Gozitan and took more than 6,100first-count votes there in 2022, in his first general election. Gozo and Planning Minister Clint Camilleri is also popular with the island’s voters, winning more than 6,400 first-count votes in the same year.

Labour is fielding three ministers across the district: Camilleri, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights, Anton Refalo, and Minister for Health and Active Ageing Jo Etienne Abela. In total, 13 candidates are running in Gozo, among them only two women.

Gozo records the highest turnout in Malta, though it slipped below 88% in 2022. Borg is betting that being a Gozitan party leader on the ballot will help lift it again. Camilleri, meanwhile, has courted the politically powerful hunting and trapping lobby, the FKNK, for public backing.

The Labour strongholds under pressure: the 4th and 5th

The 4th and 5th Districts are also drawing the attention of pollsters such as Vincent Marmara. Both are traditional Labour strongholds, but questions remain over whether the ruling party can hold all four seats (to the PN’s one) it won in 2022. 

Two seats become a possibility for the PN once it reaches around 33% of the vote. In 2017, it secured two seats in the 5th District with that share. In 2022, the PN secured 31.5% in the 5th and 29.4% in the 4th. 

In the 5th, the PL is using a familiar strategy, fielding Prime Minister Robert Abela. A PL party leader has contested there in both the 2017 and 2022 elections. 

In 2022, Abela secured 9,996 first-count votes, more than 4,000 more than his then-counterpart, Bernard Grech, who also contested there. The PN has avoided a similar stunt in 2026, but Abela will be hoping his presence secures his party’s 4-seat majority.

Ministers Miriam Dalli, Owen Bonnici and Julia Farrugia, along with PS Omar Farrugia, are expected to secure more votes.

The PN has put up Toni Bezzina and some new faces, including Conrad Borg Manche, the former PL mayor of Gżira, who crossed to the PN for this election.

In the 4th, Labour is fielding four Cabinet members – Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri, Justice Minister Jonathan Attard, Transport Minister Chris Bonett and Parliamentary Secretary for Social Dialogue and Accommodation Andy Ellul – alongside sitting MPs Ray Abela, Katya De Giovanni and Amanda Spiteri Grech. 

Leading the PN’s push for a bigger share are MP Mark Anthony Sammut, former PN Secretary General Michael Piccinio and MP Bernice Bonello.

Re-Drawn Battlegrounds in the 12th and 8th: Over 24,000 Voters Moved Across Malta

The biggest wildcard is the boundary changes. The relocation of more than 24,000 voters into new districts will reshape several contests.

The largest single shift is in Naxxar: more than 10,980 voters have been moved out of the 12th and into the 8th (+6,051) and the 10th (+4,931). The new districts are historically PN-held, and the party has won them in each of the last three elections. 

The 12th, which will receive 3,734 voters from Mgarr, which was previously part of the 7th District, is far tighter; in 2022, the PN won 49.4% of the vote to the PL’s 46.8%. 

The PN has seemingly responded. PN Leader Alex Borg will contest in the district and will also hope to capitalise on the loss of former district heavyweights Clayton Bartolo and Michael Farrugia, who together received almost 5,500 first count votes.

The PL hopes to plug the gap with Minister Jonathan Attard, PS Alicia Bugeja Said and former MPs Deborah Schembri and Franco Mercieca.

A second shift hits the 8th District, which loses 4,177 voters from the Birkirkara/Fleur-de-Lys area to the 1st District, where Labour’s share climbed to roughly 60% in 2022. 

The 8th returned a 52% PN majority in 2022, but was as tight as 49% in 2013. This year, the PN fields Adrian Delia, Beppe Fenech Adami, Justin Schembri and Julie Zahra, while Labour hopes that Minister Clyde Caruana, Alex Muscat, Ramona Attard and newcomer Josef Bugeja, the former GWU president,  can use the voter shift to turn the district.

Many were not labelled as political at all. On Google, dozens of ads carrying the Labour Party’s electoral slogan were filed under categories such as “Arts and entertainment” and “Family and Community. One payer who is suspected to work within the Office of the Prime Minister.

For others, including ads for the Nationalist Party running on websites across Malta, the payer cannot be identified at all.

Amphora Media is tracking political social media advertising on its Open Malta platform.

Since the election was called on 27th April, candidates have run at least 615 ads on Facebook and Instagram. 

A further 142 ads for the Labour Party have appeared on Google, run either by its media arm, One Productions, or by Clive Farrugia. One Clive Farrugia is the head of secretariat at the Office of the Prime Minister – he did not respond to a right of reply asking him to confirm or deny whether he placed ads on Google, but he is seen reposting Robert Abela’s and PL’s posts on his Facebook profile.

From October 2025, Google and Meta stopped running electoral ads in the EU following the bloc’s expansion of its advertising transparency requirements. 

Since the rule change, Amphora Media has identified at least 1,200 ads on election candidates’ Facebook pages.  Before then, the PL, PN and their candidates ran over 9,900 ads on Facebook and Instagram.

In most cases, the candidates advertising on their personal profiles declared themselves as the payers. In some cases, it was a business associated with the candidate.

Yet there are some notable exceptions: the Office of the Commissioner for Animal Welfare is the indicated payer of a paid promotion on Fleur Abela’s personal page, which features the Labour Party’s electoral slogan, Int Malta. In response to Amphora Media’s questions, Abela said that she paid for the ad herself.

META ads run by candidates since 27th April 2026:

Most ads run by candidates since 31st October 2025:

Google: Political Ads Labelled As ‘Entertainment’ And ‘Family’ By One 

Since the snap election was called, Amphora Media identified 74 political ads on Google placed by One Productions Ltd. Some of them have since been removed. 

Although the ads were clearly political and included the PL’s electoral slogan, they were labelled as “Arts and entertainment”, “Family and Community” or “Business and industrial”.

A second advertiser placing ads on Google for the PL was Clive Farrugia. Amphora Media found 68 ads by him, labelled “News, Books and Publications”, “Jobs and Education” and others.

One Productions did not reply to Amphora Media’s questions about these ads. It has not been filing audited accounts, as required by Maltese law, since 2010.

The Nationalist Party is also running Google ads on websites across Malta. However, it is not possible to identify the payer on the platforms the ad is running.

Google did not reply when asked whether it considered these ads compliant with its policies.

What the EU actually requires and why the platforms opted out?

The EU did not ban political advertising. 

According to the Commission’s guidelines, very large online platforms and search engines have obligations under the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising regulation when they provide political advertising services (e.g., publishing, delivering, or disseminating political advertising) for remuneration. 

Ad technology providers like Google are considered political advertising publishers jointly with the public-facing interface (e.g. a news website).

Meta has called the provisions ‘unworkable’, and Google said ads defined as political are difficult to identify at scale. Both decided to stop allowing political ads. Google’s policy also affects YouTube, and Meta’s policy covers Facebook and Instagram.

Meta: short-lived ads on personal pages

Meta defines political ads as “Made by, on behalf of or about a candidate for public office, a political figure, a political party, a political action committee or advocates for the outcome of an election to public office; or About any election, referendum or ballot initiative, including ‘go out and vote’ or election campaigns”.

Meta says it reviews ads for violation of its policy based on “specific components of an ad, such as images, video, text and targeting information, as well as an ad’s associated landing page or other destinations”. The review is automated, and a manual review is added: “in some cases”.

Amphora Media is informed that Meta considers political ads running on Maltese candidates’ pages non-compliant with its policy and rejects them when it becomes aware of them.

Facebook’s ad library reveals the scope of this whack-a-mole approach: although there are fresh ads any given day, political ads are routinely rejected, and those that were not caught often run for under a day.

The European Commission’s spokesperson said that “It is for national authorities to enforce the Regulation [on ad transparency]. It is for the sponsor of political ads – the person seeking to publish a political ad – to declare the political nature of the ad. However, once platforms become aware of an undeclared political ad, they need to take immediate measures to ensure the ad’s political nature is properly declared. If necessary, they must withhold the dissemination until this takes place.”

The spokesperson added that “The Commission may revise these guidelines in the future, to take into account the lessons learned from the implementation. The Commission will also take stock of the implementation with stakeholders through an implementation dialogue in the course of this year.”