Civil society groups are holding a protest outside Auberge de Castille in Valletta on Wednesday evening calling for Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s resignation.  

The event will begin at 6pm outside the Office of the Prime Minister.  

“If you are a member of civil society, if you feel you’ve been lied to, time and time again, if you feel that those whose duty it is to safeguard our country and institutions have betrayed the country, then you need to be at Castille today, Wednesday November 20, at 6pm to demand parliamentarians remove Joseph Muscat from the post of prime minister if they don’t get his resignation first,” a statement issued by Repubblika, Occupy Justice, and manueldelia.com reads. 

The groups are reacting to news that prominent businessman Yorgen Fenech was arrested on Wednesday morning after he was intercepted at sea aboard his yacht by the Armed Forces of Malta.

In a joint investigation by Times of Malta and Reuters, Mr Fenech was named as the owner of the once-secret offshore company 17 Black which has been embroiled in corruption allegations involving the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri and minister Konrad Mizzi.  

His arrest on Wednesday comes just 24 hours after Times of Malta reported  how a suspected middleman in the Daphne Caruana Galizia assassination plot had been apprehended and was seeking a presidential pardon in exchange for identifying the person who commissioned the car bomb murder back in October 2017. 

In their statement, the civil society groups said that Dr Muscat should have fired both Mr Schembri and Dr Mizzi when their names first cropped up in the Panama Papers leak back in 2016. 

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