I was there for the Daphne Caruana Galizia verdict. It was like hearing a court rule the Earth is flat

In the Malta courtroom, there were gasps of shock, and then yells of victory from the family of the tycoon Yorgen Fenech, after a jury defied expectations and acquitted him of all charges relating to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

And, as Daphne’s family sat quietly in the gallery taking it in, I imagined in my head, influenced by the catastrophe in Nepal, an explosive gush of dirty floodwater into that courtroom, sweeping away benches and lawyers and jurors, and then out into the streets of Valletta, knocking everything aside – and destroying all that had been built.

For nearly nine years after her death, so many have worked so hard to achieve “Justice for Daphne”. The jailing of Fenech, who had admitted funnelling over €400,000 to the gang that killed her, had felt inevitable: the moment for some closure. 

Since the car bomb on 16 October 2017 that killed Daphne, thousands have protested on the streets in monthly vigils. A group of women known as Occupy Justice have regularly fought for the simple right to maintain candles for Daphne on a Valletta memorial. A public inquiry has demanded change, parliamentarians across Europe have enacted legislation, some good police detectives have soldiered on, and Daphne’s indefatigable three sons have never stopped pressing for justice and change. Shortly after Daphne's murder, I joined nearly 40 journalists from multiple outlets, gathered together under the name the Daphne Project, to continue her work.

All of this, to quote Dylan Thomas, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”. 

So much energy – and it seemed to be reaching a conclusion, with the prospect of Fenech being jailed for life. He is one of the richest men on the island.

My friend Juliette Garside of the Guardian and I were in the courtroom in Valletta to mark the moment. Juliette has worked tirelessly to keep Daphne’s story on the front page, and has picked up the sword of many of Daphne’s investigations. My obsession was: who killed her?

Before his mother died, I knew Daphne’s son Matthew as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. And though we’ve disagreed on many things, and I’ve always reported neutrally, he’s felt like a brother.

Matthew has told the story again and again to the media, and maybe five times in court, of how he stepped out of the house, walked barefoot down the hill, and saw his mother in bits in a hateful burning field. So I broke up a little when, before the verdict, I said to Juliette: “Can this be the last time that Matthew has to tell that story?” She noted how we’d all grown a little older. 

We invested months and months on the case, in the early days checking under our hire cars for a missing bomb that the police told us was still in circulation. 

During this time, I worked closely with Jacob Borg, a local reporter with the Times of Malta. We’d first identified Fenech as a suspect by the spring of 2019 and asked police about him. Fenech was the owner of a secret offshore company called 17 Black that Daphne was investigating when she died, and was threatening to expose as a vehicle for corruption. While making a podcast, Who Killed Daphne, we had got one of the assassins, George Degiorgio, to confess (he had previously been pleading not guilty).

The family’s campaign and tireless investigative reporting had led to this day – ensuring the Maltese authorities could not let go of this inconvenient stain on their reputation – an obstacle in the determined attempt of some politicians to build a kind of Dubai in Europe, open to mass tourism and no-questions-asked business.

So, in court, we watched the jury forewoman walk into courtroom 22 in Valletta with a yellow paper folder that contained the verdict on the two charges against Fenech: complicity in the murder, and a lesser charge of conspiracy, a criminal association with those that killed Daphne. 

The jury, who had been confined in a hotel together for the last two months, acquitted him by 8-1 on both counts.

During the two-month trial, Fenech’s defence team had thrown up a lot of smoke. In particular, they had flagged allegations that others had tried to kill Daphne, not least key figures in the Labour government of former prime minister Joseph Muscat.

After his first arrest in 2019, Jacob and I encountered Fenech in a courtroom corridor. He said he was a ruined man and was going to spill all the beans. “The truth will come out,” he said. 

The man that Fenech and his lawyers tried to portray as the real mastermind of Daphne’s killing was Muscat’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri. (Nobody has claimed, or produced any evidence, that Muscat himself was involved.) 

Schembri, a businessman and Muscat’s campaign manager, was often caricatured as the puppet-master of the prime minister’s government. Daphne had exposed Schembri’s secret offshore company via the Panama Papers, the leak of documents to a consortium of journalists from a Panama law firm.

And Schembri was frequently the object of Daphne’s scorn. He was the subject of the last post that she made on her blog, “Running Commentary”, a few minutes before her assassination, headlined: "That crook Schembri was in court today, pleading that he is not a crook."

Fenech – the boss of a Maltese property and investment empire, and a heavy cocaine user (as he told the police and the court) – was a friend of Keith Schembri. But when he was arrested in November 2019, and at his trial, he said the “hidden hand” in the murder had been Schembri’s. He alleged police had failed to consider Schembri as a suspect, giving him a free pass. “All roads lead to Keith, and all bridges to Keith were burned,” his lawyer said.

In truth, however, Fenech never produced any concrete evidence at the trial that Schembri knew of the murder before it occurred, still less that he was the man who ordered it. In court, Schembri denied all involvement in the plot, but he did say he had helped Fenech cover it up. 

Sometime after Daphne was killed, Schembri said he had gone for a drink with Fenech in Valletta after a fundraising dinner. Speaking to jurors, Schembri said Fenech had  “indicated” to Schembri he had been involved in the assassination after they’d gone out for dinner and drinks. “I froze … He said things that led me to believe that he might have been the one who did it, and I just froze,” Schembri said. “We burst out crying and then hugged each other and went home.

“I didn’t speak to anyone … maybe because he was my friend. I made one single mistake: when I started hearing things, I didn’t go straight to the prime minister. That was a huge mistake and a heavy cross to bear.”

The trial also heard a recording of Fenech that told the same story, of how he had admitted his involvement in the murder to his friend, but only after the crime. 

The implication was chilling. Malta had promised to leave no stone unturned to provide justice for Daphne; but Schembri, who liaised with security services, and had been briefed on ongoing inquiries by police, had secretly known valuable information and kept it quiet.

The inquiry, we learned, had been corrupted. And that was not the end of it. The trial heard allegations that Fenech and the gang who planted the bomb had been kept constantly informed about emerging details of the police investigation and when arrests would happen. It is unclear who allegedly leaked what, but Silvio Valletta, the islands’ former chief detective, was a top buddy of Fenech (for example, a year before his arrest, Fenech had taken him to watch Chelsea play Liverpool). Valletta denies wrongdoing.

Regardless of the ultimate verdict, it’s incredible that – despite all these obstacles – the case went to trial. But the verdict remains a cold fact. Nobody is convicted of ordering Daphne’s murder and the family are still without justice.

It’s hard to speculate about how the jurors came to that verdict. In Matthew’s words, the jury had “declared the Earth is flat”. Did they buy the theory that someone else, like Schembri, was the real mastermind? Did they simply believe the evidence was weak? Or were they just scared of the consequences of jailing someone with so many powerful friends on a small island? 

The next journalistic prize is to interview the jury about their logic. Meanwhile, Matthew and his family, as they consider how to force a retrial, can at least take some small comfort. Before the trial, Matthew told the Times of Malta how he had initially seen the whole country as collectively responsible for taking his mother from him. But watching people stay all night with him outside the prime minister’s office, during mass protests held to demand justice, changed that. “I no longer felt anger at the country,” he said. “I was left only with anger at the individuals who are responsible.” 

There has been an outpouring of support and disgust after the jury’s verdict. Matthew says he hasn’t altered his view of his country. He still has optimism that things can change.

No family of a murder victim should have had to go through what they have gone through – it was an outrage that it was left to them to campaign for justice, for the legislation needed to protect reporters like their mum, or to have to testify on the motive for the crime. For nine years, they have been combating an octopus of betrayal and corruption that has wound its tentacles around every institution that they deserved to rely on.

At the end of the movie Chinatown, when corruption finally wins, Jake Gittes, the private eye played by Jack Nicholson, is told: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.” In a small intertwined society, every righteous move can get compromised and thwarted. In the 21st century, Malta, and Europe, deserve a hell of lot better.

Stephen Grey hosts the Audible podcast Who Killed Daphne. He left Reuters last year to found a new investment fund for investigative journalism. @StephenGrey