Man in secret meetings with ex-police chief charged over falsified document
Edgar Brincat suspected to have passed on false medical certificate to Lawrence Cutajar at 2019 meeting during Daphne Caruana Galizia murder investigation
A car dealer who held secret meetings with ex-police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar during the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder investigation has been prosecuted for allegedly falsifying a medical certificate.
Edgar Brincat, known as Il-Ġojja, is suspected to have passed on the falsified medical certificate to Cutajar during one of their meetings in 2019.
The certificate, allegedly drawn up by Il-Ġojja’s daughter, who is a doctor, was used to justify Brincat’s absence from a court hearing over a traffic offence.
Brincat, often described as a father figure to murder middleman Melvin Theuma, was charged last year along with his daughter. The pair deny the charges.
Investigators stumbled across the medical certificate during a wider inquiry into leaks by public officials during the murder investigation.
Cutajar was a focus of the leaks’ inquiry after he allegedly asked Brincat during one of their meetings if he knew where Theuma kept secret recording implicating businessman Yorgen Fenech in the Caruana Galizia murder plot.
Brincat is subsequently understood to have informed Theuma that the police commissioner knew about the recordings.
Investigators stumbled across the medical certificate during a wider inquiry into leaks by public officials during the murder investigation
Theuma was arrested in November 2019 as part of a money-laundering investigation that was used as a ruse to successfully secure those recordings while Cutajar was still police commissioner.
The murder middleman is now the star witness in the case against Fenech, who denies any involvement in the October 2017 assassination.
Cutajar, who had his electronic devices confiscated by the police during a search in 2021, is not facing prosecution as a result of the leaks inquiry.
The inquiry did, however, lead to other prosecutions, including of Joseph Muscat’s former chief of staff Keith Schembri.
Kenneth Camilleri, an ex-bodyguard of Muscat, testified that Schembri sent him to “calm” Theuma down in 2018. Fenech too was charged following the inquiry for allegedly bribing former police officer Ray Aquilina.
Both men deny the charges.
Investigators had zoomed in on the planned sale of a Birżebbuġa apartment to Aquilina, that Fenech was suspected of facilitating.
At that stage, Aquilina was meant to be investigating Fenech over his ownership of 17 Black, a secret company suspected to have been intended to funnel payments to Schembri and former minister Konrad Mizzi.