The Constitutional Court has ordered the Attorney General to hand over a full copy of the Egrant inquiry to Opposition leader Adrian Delia but ruled that it cannot be published.

Chief Justice Joseph Azzopardi and judges Giannino Caruana Demajo and Anthony Ellul ruled that the Attorney General had breached the PN leader’s rights to expression and discriminated against him by handing a copy of the report to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat but not to him. The court said it was not necessary for the Attorney General to publish the report but didn’t impose any publication restrictions when granting Delia access to it.

The PN leader has repeatedly pledged to publish the report should he win the case.

Attorney General Peter Grech has warned that the inquiry’s publication risks jeopardising police investigations and a court ruled in his favour a few months ago, but Delia has now won the case on appeal.

In July 2018, magistrate (now judge) Aaron Bugeja ruled that there was no evidence to back up Daphne Caruana Galizia’s story that the Panama company Egrant belonged to Michelle Muscat and that it had received large sums of money from the ruling family of Azerbaijan through a bank account at Pilatus Bank.

The inquiry also found that signatures of a Mossack Fonseca nominee director on alleged declarations of trust, which had been presented to the magistrate, by former Malta Independent editor Pierre Portelli had been forged.

Joseph Muscat said he was the victim of an elaborate frame-up and had pledged to publish the full report but backtracked after Attorney General Peter Grech warned him that doing os could jeopardise police investigations into the frame-up.

Delia then sued Grech on the grounds that he was creating a political imbalance by granting the Labour Party leader, but not the Nationalist Party leader, access to the full report. In July, Judge Robert Mangion ruled in favour of Grech, prompting Delia to file an appeal.