The public inquiry into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia continues on Friday.
Tax Commissioner Marvin Gaerty will be giving his testimony behind-closed-doors as it deals with private persons and other investigations.
The judges said that any parts of the testimony that they feel are of public interest will be duly published.
The public inquiry is tasked with, amongst other things, determining whether the State did all it could to prevent the murder from happening. 09:56 That’s it for today. So far, no date has been set for future sittings of the inquiry. We will update this space with any information coming from the public inquiry board.
Updated 6.13pm
Yorgen Fenech donated money to the Nationalist Party and was also given stories about the party to leak to rival media, former PN executive Pierre Portelli confirmed under oath on Wednesday.
Portelli, who headed the PN’s media arm between 2017 and 2019, confirmed that Fenech’s Tumas Group was among firms that donated money to the party, albeit “not regularly”.
He recalled sending Fenech a text message in March 2019 asking the business magnate for help to process a donation that the PN needed to pay for workers’ salaries.
Fenech, who is charged with complicity in Caruana Galizia’s murder, had already been exposed by
Murder suspect Yorgen Fenech and Revenue Commissioner Marvin Gaerty exchanged messages about a story written by “that witch”, an inquiry board heard on Friday.
Confronted about the message during the public inquiry into journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death, Gaerty claimed not to know who “the witch” Fenech had referred to was.
The journalist’s detractors, including political figures, often derided her publicly as “the Bidnija witch”.
The February 2019 exchange centered on foreign holdings that Fenech told Gaerty he had paid taxes on in 2016, and which “the witch” first wrote about in 2017.
Caruana Galizia had first made a cryptic reference to Fenech’s company 17 Black in February 2017. She was blown up by a car bomb outside her home eight months later.
The late renowned author Frans Sammut did not take up an offer from former prime minister Joseph Muscat to contribute to a blog intended to put Daphne Caruana Galizia in a bad light, his son said on Monday.
“It went against his personal identity,” Mark Sammut told the public inquiry into the journalist s murder.
He recalled a conversation during which his father had casually commented about Muscat’s request.
“I clearly recall that time when we were having a father and son chat at the kitchen table and at the time, it did not strike me,” said Sammut.
It was only years later, following media reports about Muscat’s testimony at the public inquiry, that reality “hit” him.