Simon Mercieca is serialising a drip dripping of extracts from the criminal inquiry into the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia in defiance of explicit court orders and of implicit norms of basic decency.
Simon Mercieca works for the man accused of killing Daphne Caruana Galizia. He denies that claim and says his mission is merely the pursuit of truth. He claims he does not need to be paid to step into the defence of Yorgen Fenech. He says he thinks Yorgen Fenech is being framed.
Yorgen Fenech is a man of means. Before he was a prisoner of the state he was surrounded by sycophants of all sorts. He used lawyers, architects, politicians, journalists, police officers, government officials, and regulators, to reach his aims. He paid them or tempted them with the hope of reward.
Yorgen Fenech didn’t, at the time, have much use for historians and academics. Yorgen Fenech’s money bought him favours and power from people who could provide him with that. He operated casinos to launder money and ensured nobody stopped him. He got permits to build high-rise buildings where nobody else was allowed to do so. For months he got away with murder as he flew the police officer who was supposed to arrest him to watch international football games in expensive seats.
Even from within prison he continues to profit from his endeavours, criminal and otherwise. His list of friends and allies who are willing to be seen helping him may have got shorter. The relative prominence of graduates of the Sorbonne with an understanding of the early modern period has risen dramatically.
If Simon Mercieca’s soul has been purchased by Yorgen Fenech it won’t be the first or the last. If Simon Mercieca has given his soul up to Yorgen Fenech for free, he won’t be the first or the last to do that either. Some people are besotted by money and addicted to the thrill of importance that comes with betraying what they know to be right. Professor Simon Mercieca will probably get the comparison with Ephialtes of Trachis.
Simon Mercieca has got hold of the evidence in the criminal inquiry. ‘Got hold’ suggests Simon Mercieca has shown some ability in acquiring information that is not available to everyone. If you accept the explanation that he works for Yorgen Fenech, the information came to him from the first person who has a constitutional right to access it: the man accused of the murder.
The function of the inquiry is to examine all clues, document them before reaching any conclusions about who if anyone should be accused of perpetrating the crime. Part of that evidence, as Simon Mercieca reports, shows that Daphne Caruana Galizia, on the day that she would be killed, had a row with her husband Peter.
It should surprise no one who has ever read Daphne that at least part of the quarrel was pursued in writing in emails to her husband. Many have read with close attention Daphne’s writings but that was for writings she meant us to read. Reading her private correspondence is a violent intrusion into her life to which we had no right when she was alive, even less now.
Under all circumstances their row would be an entirely private matter. Just by the simple fact that you cannot organise the bombing of their car the same day that you have a fight with someone, the quarrel has long been ruled out of relevance for the investigation of Daphne’s murder. With time the investigations would find how and who the bomb was planted and those responsible would confess their crimes and be convicted for them.
The evidence leads up to Yorgen Fenech and a long-planned plot to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia because of her work. Her family life had nothing to do with the manner of its ending.
Anyone working for Yorgen Fenech would not be necessarily interested in proving anyone, but Yorgen Fenech, did it. All they need is to plant the thought in the minds of enough people who might eventually be picked up to hear his trial that anyone else might have committed the crime.
Reasonable doubt is all one should have, to be forced to acquit a person accused of murder. But who’s to define reasonable? And how can any doubt, however maliciously planted, be made to overcome the simple fact that upon his arrest Yorgen Fenech asked, and was denied, a presidential pardon? That’s hardly the behaviour you would expect of an innocent man finding themselves in a frame they have nothing to do with.
In the absence of reasonable doubt, Yorgen Fenech and his agents, like Simon Mercieca, plant unreasonable doubt: the possibility that any alternative explanation, however outlandish, might weaken the state’s case against the man who murdered Daphne.
Because he works for Yorgen Fenech, Simon Mercieca is indifferent to the consequences. He is ambivalent about the new pain and suffering of the victim’s relatives who are forced to live with cruel gossip, to have to live down irrelevancies brought up merely to ensure that the person who killed their wife, mother, daughter, aunt, and sister, gets away with it. All Simon Mercieca cares about is that Yorgen Fenech walks free. All he seeks to do is kill Daphne Caruana Galizia again, besmirch her memory, driving wedges between those who mourn her loss personally and those who are moved by civic conscience to react with determination to the vile actions of criminals.
In all this I see Yorgen Fenech: a man who must, until a trial finds otherwise, be presumed innocent of the crime of killing a journalist and expecting then, as now, to get away with it. It should be said that Yorgen Fenech continues to deny any wrongdoing. He gets Simon Mercieca to falsely accuse the people who suffered most from the wrongdoing he denies instead.