Daphne Caruana Galizia
Investigative journalist whose daily blog exposed corruption and cronyism in Malta
DAPHNE Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb last Monday aged 53, was Malta’s leading investigative journalist and a fearless critic of cronyism and corruption; her outspoken and uncompromising personal blog, Running Commentary, in which she daily lambasted crooks and politicians of all parties, was visited by some 400,000 people a day (the population of Malta is 420,000).
She was born Daphne Anne Vella on August 26, 1964 in Sliema, the heartland of the Maltese bourgeoisie, and educated at one of the island’s leading girls’ schools, St Dorothy’s Convent, and afterwards at the Jesuit St Aloysius College. She later took a degree in archaeology at the University of Malta.
After her marriage to Peter Caruana Galizia, a lawyer, she began working as a journalist from 1987. In the early 1990s, she became a regular columnist with the Sunday Times of Malta, the paper founded by Lord Strickland. She was later an associate editor with the Malta Independent; popular as these columns were, however, she found an even wider audience with her blog.
Inevitably, Daphne Caruana Galizia made some powerful enemies. She was sued for libel several times and her most high profile campaign — an investigation into Malta’s links with the so-called Panama Papers, which revealed the identities of countless powerful figures with money in offshore holdings in Panama — had alleged that Michelle Muscat, the wife of the Labour prime minister Joseph Muscat was the ultimate beneficiary of a company called Egrant, which was being used to channel funds from Azerbaijan. This precipitated an early election, which the Labour party won with an increased majority.
Nonetheless, the Labour government remained in her sights, and Daphne Caruana Galizia often seemed to be the only voice of opposition on the island. Her criticism of the government’s programme for the sale of Maltese passports (which brought European citizenship with them) was scathing. Her wit was sharp, whether it was discussing the passport sales, or the President’s choice of dress for meeting the British Queen. (At her convent school, she had learned dressmaking, a fact of which she was rather proud, and she used this knowledge to evaluate various sartorial disasters with forensic hilarity.)
She delighted in the fact that her political targets appeared to have no sense of humour, and that they could not tell the difference between, as she put it, “a joke and a machete”. Nor were the Nationalist opposition immune from her scrutiny.
One of her latest campaigns was to highlight what she regarded as the unworthiness for office of Adrian Delia, a man who benefited from the ownership, she discovered, of several properties in London’s Soho which were used for prostitution — a fact, he said, which was unknown to him.
Despite this, Delia went on to be elected leader of the Nationalist party after a popular vote of members.
In 2016 Daphne Caruana Galizia was named by the American political website Politico as one of “28 people who are shaping, shaking and stirring Europe”, describing her as a “one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta”.
She frequently despaired of the Maltese who seemed more than happy to put up with, indeed reward, what she perceived as a corrupt political class, and she had been subject to numerous attempts to silence her through the courts, as well as death threats.
On the day of her death, she posted her final blog. “There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she wrote. “The situation is desperate.”
She married Peter Caruana Galizia in 1985. He survives her with their three sons.