Read this report of the arguments brought in court today by Keith Schembri’s lawyers. I’m not summarising it because the issues are very complex and there’s a lot being hinted which is not being explicitly said in all the words here. I don’t want any of that lost in summaries and adaptations.
The following list of things were not expressly said by Keith Schembri’s lawyers. Nor are they documented, verified facts. Nor are they, for that matter, anything more than my understanding of what Keith Schembri and his lawyers may have wanted us to understand by what they said, conclusions I may very well be wrong about. I am wondering if Keith Schembri’s lawyers want us to believe that these things have happened or are happening:
- Yorgen Fenech and his lawyers somehow got hold of Keith Schembri’s mobile phone, the one that was held by police, and which is intended to be used in the prosecution of Keith Schembri and the prosecution of others.
- It is not clear why Keith Schembri’s second phone (because the first one Keith Schembri himself lost has never surfaced) might be useful to Yorgen Fenech. It is not clear if the usefulness of this second phone to Yorgen Fenech is necessarily something we’ll ever find out about in open court.
- Keith Schembri’s lawyers do not appear convinced by Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech’s explanations about the disappearance and the reappearance of Keith Schembri’s second phone. They’re not saying she’s lying about it. They are saying they want the issue of the phone to be taken away from her hands while a higher court hears their argument that the phone should not be used as evidence against Keith Schembri.
I am invited to sum these points by the gaps in the explanations given by Keith Schembri’s lawyers. From their point of view, they don’t owe us an explanation. Their job is limited to getting their client off the hook and if one way of doing that is to deprive prosecutors of the evidence against their client, they’re going to do just that.
Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech might also feel she owes nobody an explanation. Though her huffing fury at “the court’s administration” when she was the one to find the phone in her office in a file which was not supposed to be in her office hollows out her effort to blame anybody else.
No one feels they owe us an explanation where the phone was when it was missing and what was being taken out of it when that was happening. No one will tell us why Yorgen Fenech might benefit from using copies of some of the conversations Keith Schembri might have had just to bend someone to his will.
All we have behind the mealy-mouthed convenience mongering is a deafening omertà, a gaunt silence designed to make sure that by the end of it all nobody pays.