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Commentary
World Politics Review

How the Murder of a Journalist in Malta Exposed Europe’s Corruption Problem

nate_sibley
nate_sibley
Fellow and Director, Kleptocracy Initiative

Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent her career cataloguing what she believed to be endemic corruption among the political elite in Malta, the European Union’s smallest member state. When she was murdered in a car bomb in October 2017, it was, in the words of one of her three sons, “an assassination to match the scale of the crimes on which she was reporting.”

Now, more than two years later, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat is set to resign amid growing concerns over his handling of Caruana Galizia’s murder investigation. Partly due to a long delay by Maltese authorities, evidence has just recently begun to emerge implicating senior members of Muscat’s government in her death. It has cast a harsh light on Malta’s role as a murky offshore financial center, while exposing systemic vulnerabilities to corruption and other financial misdeeds across the EU.

Read the full article in World Politics Review