Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Tom Watson among those calling for more to be done to investigate murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Malta’s government has been told to take urgent action to implement EU anti-money laundering rules, as MEPs rang the alarm about the dangers for journalists investigating financial crime following the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.



The pressure intensified as the country’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, attended the Commonwealth heads of government summit in London amid further calls for him to provide reassurance that her death is being fully and impartially investigated.



Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, called on the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, to challenge Muscat “over this very serious case … It is clear not enough progress has been made in the investigation of this terrible murder.”



EU politicians demand broader inquiry into Daphne Caruana Galizia murder Read more

The intervention came two days after the launch of the Daphne Project, a collaboration between international media organisations, including the Guardian, that came together in response to her murder and have pledged to continue her work.

The reverberations from the launch continued today across the political and cultural spectrums. Seventy-two MEPs, from six political groups, added their names to an open letter from 250 international authors, including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, demanding the removal from office of Jason Micallef, the chairman of Valletta 2018, the European Capital of Culture.

In a letter to the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, they accused Micallef of ridiculing Caruana Galizia.

The commission itself piled pressured on Malta, one of eight EU member states that missed a deadline last year to put an EU anti-money laundering directive into national law. The EU directive, agreed in 2015, tightened up anti-money-laundering checks, requiring authorities to create registers that disclose the true owners of companies.

The European commission said on Thursday that it was “in dialogue with the Maltese authorities” on the implementation of the rules. “There are ongoing infringement proceedings against several member states, including Malta, and we expect them to transpose the relevant EU rules urgently,” a commission spokesperson said.

The European Banking Authority has also been asked to ensure “that financial institutions established in Malta satisfy the requirements laid down in union anti- money laundering and counter terrorism legislation,” the spokesperson added.

Malta’s government announced last week a three-year strategy to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. Police will be required to create an anti-money-laundering unit, while courts will be asked to do more to trace and freeze the proceeds of crime. Other measures include more staff at Malta’s financial intelligence unit and the creation of transparency registers to reveal the true owners of companies, trusts and charities.

Transparency registers for companies will eventually have to be available to all citizens, not only government officials, after MEPs on Thursday backed measures to extend EU anti-money-laundering checks.

Under the 2015 version of the law, which Malta has failed to implement, only national officials have access to a register of beneficial owners of companies, but the EU has now agreed to open these registers to journalists, NGOs and other citizens.

The change, which will take at least 18 months to be implemented, has been hailed by anti-corruption campaigners as a big step in the fight against tax evasion, although trusts will escape scrutiny.

Demands for transparency gained momentum after the Panama Papers exposed how secretive offshore companies were used to evade tax, shelter criminal funds and hide political bribes. Terror attacks in Paris and Brussels also exposed loopholes used by terrorists to move funds across borders.

Q&A What is the Daphne Project? Show Hide A fearless anti-corruption journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s reporting came to international attention with her exposes in the 2016 Panama Papers project. On 16 October the following year, the Maltese reporter was murdered by a bomb placed under the driver’s seat of her car. The Daphne Project was created to continue her investigations. It is a collaboration of 18 media organisations in 15 different countries, including the Guardian, Reuters, Le Monde and the New York Times. The project is the first to be led by Forbidden Stories, an international network of journalists who stand ready to take over when colleagues are silenced through imprisonment or murder. The project will publish a series of fresh revelations, setting out the dangers that alleged political corruption and poor controls on money laundering inside Malta pose to law and order in Europe.

Separately on Thursday, MEPs backed a resolution calling for better protection of journalists and whistleblowers across the EU. The text, approved by 573 of the parliament’s 751 members, was drawn up largely as a response to the murder of Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak, who had been investigating extortion of EU agricultural funds by the Italian mafia, allegedly supported by local politicians.

Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová, were murdered in their home, prompting Slovakia’s biggest street protests since the fall of communism and the resignation of the prime minister.

In the resolution, MEPs said they were concerned about “the allegations of corruption, misuse of EU funds, abuse of power and conflicts of interest in Slovakia, which could cause the deterioration of democracy”.



The European parliament’s special committee on financial crimes should “evaluate the allegations of VAT fraud, money laundering and misuse of European funds … with special regard to the work of Ján Kuciak and other investigative journalists,” it said.

A bomb silenced Daphne Caruana Galizia. But her investigation lives on Read more

The parliament “is appalled by the fact that this is the second fatal attack on a journalist in the EU in the past six months after journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated”.



The European parliament hopes to step up pressure on Maltese and EU authorities over the killing of Caruana Galizia. A special delegation of MEPs has called for meetings with the Maltese authorities and the European commission’s vice-president in charge of safeguarding the rule of law, Frans Timmermans.

Sven Giegold, the German Green MEP who convened the group, has long accused the commission of not doing enough. “The European commission has to overcome its light-touch policy on the rule of law problems in Malta and urgently act as the guardian of European values,” he said.

Malta’s “cash for passports” scheme is also under the scrutiny of EU authorities. There are fears that the country is selling EU citizenship to wealthy non-residents with little connection to the island. Campaigners are planning protests outside a gala dinner event to promote Malta’s “individual investor programme”. Muscat is expected to attend the event in central London on Friday.