Repubblika has called upon the Attorney General and the Police Commissioner to “immediately” prosecute Keith Schembri and former deputy police chief Silvio Valletta as suspects for leaking sensitive information about the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder investigation.
This comes in the wake of the damning judgment delivered on Wednesday by Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff who, while turning down Yorgen Fenech’s bid to oust lead investigator Keith Arnaud from the murder case, slammed the authorities over various “institutional deficiencies”.
In its 155-page long judgment, the First Hall, Civil Court in its constitutional jurisdiction denounced those failures which could have negatively impacted investigations into the journalist’s 2017 murder.
Primary among those “deficiencies” were the “continuous leaks” of sensitive and confidential information which investigators shared during briefings at Castille.
Schembri, as former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's right-hand man, continued to attend those briefings without disclosing his “fraternal friendship” with Fenech, the businessman now awaiting trial as an alleged accomplice in the murder.
Repubblika’s call focuses mainly on one particular paragraph in that judgment where Mr Justice Mintoff states that the court believed that there were “clear indications” as to who was responsible for such leaks which could have led to possible tampering of evidence.
And those leaks also could have had a “devastating effect on the public trust in the police corps, its image and credibility,” the judge said.
But more importantly, the court stated that “there are clear indications as to who was responsible and enough evidence to charge [these persons] over such crimes.”
On Friday, Repubblika filed a judicial protest before the First Hall, Civil Court claiming that Mr Justice Mintoff was clearly pointing in the direction of Schembri and Valletta.
Both the Attorney General and the Police Commissioner, as respondents in Fenech’s case, had all that evidence mentioned by the judge in hand.
For this reason, Repubblika has now called upon those two authorities to take criminal action against Schembri and Valletta “immediately and without delay.”
Even though Judge Mintoff’s decision is still subject to appeal, nothing could impinge upon the evidence gathered in those proceedings and no appeal could cancel what the judge said about there being enough evidence to charge Schembri and Valletta over the leaks.
Unless the AG and Police Commissioner acted within seven days of notice of the judicial protest, Repubblika would take that to mean that they did not intend to do so.
Then Repubblika would seek all legal measures to contest such a decision.
Lawyers Eve Borg Costanzi and Matthew Cutajar signed the judicial protest.