Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1545828
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 JULY 2026 YORGEN FENECH TRIAL mobile phone Labour diehards ignore Schembri claims to have lost just 90 minutes before his arrest in 2019. And yet, in some quarters it's the searched by police—in court Arnaud said only two police of- ficers conducted the search. Schembri had been interrogat- ed after Fenech claimed the for- mer OPM official had put down the initial deposit on the Caru- ana Galizia murder hit. Schem- bri was never charged and has always denied involvement in the murder or knowledge of the plot. Arnaud testified that the police could not corroborate Fenech's claims and Schembri was released from police custo- dy after 48 hours with no charge. Misplaced indignation This information did not emerge for the first time in Fenech's trial by jury—it had been reported back in 2020 dur- ing the compilation of evidence stage. Nonetheless, it still raises question marks about Schem- bri's behaviour just minutes be- fore his arrest. And yet, neither back then nor now was there any indignation from Labour diehards over the purported loss of a crucial de- vice belonging to a very impor- tant person, who was very close to the man police charged as the murder mastermind. Robert Abela during the La- bour Party leadership race in January 2020 told his interview- er during a television broadcast that he did not believe Schembri lost his phone and urged police to use any available technology, if it existed, to find it. Ostensi- bly, that is the furthest rebuke of Schembri's lost phone an- tics that has ever been made in public by a senior Labour Party official. No banners went up asking 'Where is the mobile phone?'. The Labour functionaries and diehards who asked for Caru- ana Galizia's laptop were con- spicuous by their silence at the time. And they remain so to this day because the indig- nation was selective. Indeed, even now, the biggest concern among Labour's foot soldiers remains Daphne's laptop not Keith's missing devices. Soft-touch treatment Schembri's 'lost' mobile phone would have infinitely been more useful to inves- tigators in their search for the truth about the true re- lationship between Fenech and Schembri. Yet the mobile phone vanished seven years ago along with the informa- tion it contained and from the testimony we've heard so far it appears investigators accepted Schembri's explana- tion that he lost it and moved on. Arnaud's testimony that only two police officers car- ried out a search of Schem- bri's Mellieħa house, which was not a one-bedroom stu- dio flat but a villa, says a lot about the effort that went in- to probing the government's second-most powerful man after the prime minister at the time. This impression is further reinforced by the fact that Schembri's office at Auberge de Castille was only searched many hours later. Indeed, the simple but straightforward questions ju- rors put to Arnaud during his cross-examination last week reflected this sentiment. Jurors asked: 'Is it normal for just two people to conduct a search in Keith Schembri's house, and why didn't they search his office at Castille straight away?'; 'Did Schem- bri's phone location at 5am on 26 November 2019 corre- late to where he said he was at that time?'; 'Did you ask Melvin Theuma why Keith Schembri wanted to calm him down?'; 'Did investigators ask why Melvin Theuma was of- fered a government job?' Too many questions hang over the police investigation in relation to Schembri's in- volvement with Fenech up to November 2019. And 'Where is Daphne's laptop?' is cer- tainly not one of them. The man on trial Nonetheless, while the 'Where is Keith's mobile?' question remains pertinent, even if ignored by Labour diehards, the person current- ly on trial is not Schembri but Yorgen Fenech. Fenech's defence team have pursued a line of questioning so far that seeks to implicate Schembri in Caruana Gali- zia's murder. Proving Schem- bri's involvement is another thing altogether and yet on its own does little to excul- pate Fenech from the charges he faces. Fenech is charged with having commissioned Caru- ana Galizia's murder, paid €150,000 for it and urged the hitmen, through middleman Melvin Theuma, to get on with the job. The prosecution's case rests on Theuma's testimony and the recordings he made of conversations with Fenech and others, as well as evi- dence gathered from Fenech's devices. Theuma still has to testify in the jury and subsequently cross-examined by the de- fence. Fenech is pleading not guilty.