Damning Electrogas Page Missing From Final Report Was A Technical Issue, Daphne Inquiry Board Says
A “technical issue” resulted in the exclusion of three pages from the Daphne Caruana Galizia public inquiry from the final report, the board overseeing the investigation has said.
In a statement this afternoon, the board said it turns out that three pages – 23, 61 and 261 – were missing from the final report.
“It seems that the pages ended up hidden behind the preceding title pages. This was merely an unforeseen technical issue. The board will ensure that it is solved and will send new copies of the report to the concerned parties.”
One of the three pages concerns the Electrogas power station project, with the board noting that Caruana Galizia had received a huge cache of internal documents a few months before her assassination.
The board said Caruana Galizia had known that Electrogas was “on the brink of failure” and was aware of the existence of 17 Black, as evidenced by her blogposts.
In November 2017, a month after Caruana Galizia’s assassination, the government gave Electrogas a bank guarantee, allowing them to achieve financial closure.
“It is probable that had 17 Black’s owner been revealed before this date, the government would have found itself in an uncomfortable position in terms of granting this guarantee and that the company’s future would have been in doubt,” the board said.
“One cannot ignore the fact that the OPM chief of staff [Keith Schembri] had known who owns 17 Black way before Caruana Galizia wrote about it, as emerges from his testimony.”
“It is up to the police, and not the board, to determine the cause of the assassination.”
The journalist’s son Matthew Caruana Galizia, who has posited that his mother may have been killed to stop Electrogas defaulting on its loans, shared this page on his Facebook page.
“The conclusion of the Board of Inquiry is that if my mother had revealed the owner of 17 Black at a time when Electrogas was on the brink of financial collapse, the government would have not been able to guarantee a loan extension to the company, and it is the company itself that would have been reduced to dust in a field,” he said.
What action should the government take in light of the public inquiry’s findings?
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