The country was whipped into a gossip-induced frenzy, sparked by the release of chat conversations between Labour MP Rosianne Cutajar and Yorgen Fenech.
Because of a court-ordered ban on messages involving Fenech, Times of Malta and other media organisations approached the leak with trepidation.
Their caution did not stop tongues from wagging: snippets of texts, memes and snide remarks about Fenech and Cutajar’s private lives made it all over social media, court orders be damned.
Inevitably, much of the focus fell onto the most salacious details.
But the revelation that Cutajar and Fenech were intimate is arguably the least interesting part of the incident. After all, who wasn’t in bed with him?
When Fenech needed to renew his casino’s licence, it was the Malta Gaming Authority’s own lawyer who drafted his letter to do so – the same authority tasked with assessing that application.
And when he wanted advice on gaming regulation, he flew that same MGA official as well as the head of Malta’s financial services authority, Joseph Cuschieri, to Las Vegas and paid for the trip.
When Fenech was looking for property development opportunities, he did not scour classified ads: he went straight to the Planning Authority’s top man, Johann Buttigieg.
"We can do business whenever you like,” the PA top man told Fenech during that conversation
“We can do business whenever you like,” Buttigieg told Fenech during that conversation. He would later explain that away by saying he was hoping Fenech would sort him out with a job in the future.
It was a familiar theme: in 2018, Fenech promised then-PN MEP candidate Frank Psaila a job at his company if his bid for a seat failed. A year later, as the PN was condemning Fenech for owning 17 Black, two of its MPs were asking him to sponsor a conference.
On the other side of the political aisle, the trysts with Fenech were even more profane.
Konrad Mizzi, the minister who oversaw the power station deal Fenech secured and whose offshore company was due to receive money from 17 Black, privately told Fenech he loved him “lots and lots”.
Fenech had access to confidential information about Mizzi-led projects and ended up pocketing millions from at least one of those deals – an Enemalta investment in a Montenegro wind farm.
Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri had a private WhatsApp group with Fenech and continued, which lasted until weeks before Fenech was arrested and charged with complicity in Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder.
When Muscat and Schembri planned to introduce a bottle recycling scheme, Fenech put together a business plan working together with, as chance would have it, Schembri’s business partner.
And when a building contractor wanted to secure a lucrative deal to build the Marsa Junction project, it offered Fenech a €2 million reward for using his contacts to help out.
Muscat was so close to the Tumas tycoon that he justified inviting him to his birthday bash by arguing that police told him to continue to “act normal”. In other words, it would have been suspicious if Fenech was not on the prime minister’s birthday list. At the time, Fenech was already being investigated for murder.
‘Investigated’ is perhaps too big a word: the man in charge of that murder probe, deputy police commissioner Silvio Valletta, was so close to Fenech that the two went on holiday to watch football matches together.
Fenech was ultimately arrested and charged, once a middleman handed the police recordings of the tycoon discussing the alleged hit, just weeks after Times of Malta outed a “major businessman” as being a prime suspect in the case.
His influence still stretches beyond his jail cell: in 2021, one of his lawyers admitted to offering a Times of Malta journalist cash in exchange for favourable coverage. He was acquitted because of a prosecutorial blunder.
Sadly, there appears to be no real will to acknowledge, let alone tackle, the dangers of big business controlling politics. The Daphne inquiry flagged this problem multiple times in its report.
The Cutajar chats reveal how Fenech had privileged access to a government MP. It is a scandal, but it is not the dirtiest of his many liaisons.