On October 16, 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia climbed into her grey Peugeot and set off for the bank. Moments later a farmer driving on the other side of the road saw a flash and heard a scream. With the first explosion she “became a ball of fire”. The second sent the car flying 50 metres into a field. He had to stop oncoming traffic “from running over her remains”.
Daphne had just had lunch with her eldest son, Matthew. He knew it was a car bomb straight away; she had always feared being killed by one. It was the favoured method in Malta of removing people who were inconvenient and she was certainly inconvenient.
Her fear didn’t stop her, however. Nothing stopped her. The last thing she wrote, in the last of 20,000 blog posts and tens of thousands of newspaper columns, was: “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”
This book, written by Paul, the youngest of her three sons, shows just how desperate things were in Malta — and presumably still are. This year the country was rated on a par with Saudi Arabia and Rwanda in the Transparency International corruption perceptions index. Daphne spent 30 years trying to expose that corruption, as a journalist, columnist and blogger.
Her blogs were read more widely than the rest of the Maltese newspapers combined. Her reward for that was to be hounded, harassed, sent envelopes full of excrement and called a witch. When she died there were 48 outstanding libel suits against her. She has been awarded with scores of posthumous honours around the world for her journalistic work.
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A Death in Malta is an attempt, by a young man who is now an award-winning journalist himself, to capture the woman behind the headlines and disentangle the facts from the myths.
Daphne loved bright colours and Bob Marley. She didn’t marry her first love, a half-Jamaican, half-British man who introduced her to Marley’s music, but, at 21, a young lawyer from a family of lawyers. She quickly had three boys with him, but when she started to feel “suffocated” by domesticity she began to write. And once she started she couldn’t stop.
In 1990 The Sunday Times of Malta offered her a column and she became the country’s first female columnist, as well as the first journalist to write under her own name. Previously journalists in Malta didn’t use bylines, as is still the case at The Economist. Throughout her career she wrote about “drug traffickers, neo-Nazis, presidents, prime ministers and opposition leaders”. She pioneered financial journalism in Malta, turning leaks like the Panama Papers “into dramas that kept a population in suspense”.
As she became more and more outspoken, her sons got used to her checking the underside of her car. When they found their dog lying dead on the doorstep, she told them that he had accidentally eaten the snail poison. When their front door went up in flames, she could no longer make light of it and agreed to have a wall built around the house. In later years, as her journalism dug deeper into scandals that powerful people wanted hidden, it became her fortress.
It was one of those scandals that led to her death. Daphne had switched her focus to the dirty money flooding through the country and its links with the people who ran it. When Matthew, also an investigative journalist, found in the Panama Papers that two senior politicians, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, had used the same accountants to set up shell companies just after the prime minister Joseph Muscat’s election victory, she broke the embargo on the Panama Papers to write a blog about it. A year later she discovered that a shell company called 17 Black was linked to both Mizzi and Schembri. That company was owned by a leading local businessman, Yorgen Fenech, who is now awaiting trial for Daphne’s murder.
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Paul Caruana Galizia is a superb storyteller. His book reads at times like a thriller, at times like a detective story, and at times like the work of an investigative journalist uncovering webs of corruption, with levels of detail that will be most interesting to those who understand Malta, its systems and flaws. His mother emerges as no saint either. She was clearly not the easiest of women to live with. Highly determined people rarely are.
A Death in Malta is, as its subtitle suggests, a family’s quest for justice, but it is not simply a narrative quest. After Daphne’s death her sons set out tirelessly and obsessively to ensure her murderers were brought to justice. They succeeded in persuading the EU to send a delegation to investigate corruption and the Council of Europe to appoint a special rapporteur to investigate institutional failures relating to Daphne’s death. Threatened with economic ruin and the withdrawal of EU funds, Malta caved in to an independent public inquiry. The hired hitmen who carried out the assassination have since been prosecuted and jailed. Fenech, meanwhile, has been denied bail. Malta, and its corrupt institutions, is under scrutiny as never before.
This is Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacy. Her son’s book is a moving testament to the life and work of an extraordinary woman and the country-changing power of journalism.
A Death in Malta by Paul Caruana Galizia (Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99 pp336). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
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