Enemalta Walks Free: The Court Just Cleared the Bill Nobody Questioned

The Enemalta-Electrogas corruption case has been dismissed. A Maltese court found this week that the gas procurement arrangement was neither corrupt nor responsible for rising household bills — and with that, one of the more consequential legal challenges to emerge from the Daphne Caruana Galizia era closes without a conviction.

Let me be direct about what I think: that conclusion will satisfy some people in this country who needed it to be true, and it will trouble everyone else who watched how that deal was constructed in the first place.

The timing is not incidental. Energy minister Miriam Dalli has now confirmed that Malta's new gas supply agreement with BP carries no fixed price — costs will move with global indices. Times of Malta reported the minister's statement without apparent alarm, which itself tells you something about how normalised price volatility has become in a country that spent years being told its energy bills were a point of national pride. The old deal, now court-cleared, locked Malta into arrangements whose full terms the public never fully saw. The new deal floats freely on markets that Malta has no power to influence. Progress, of a kind.

Meanwhile, Yorgen Fenech's legal team suffered another setback, with a court dismissing their bid to exclude statements he made as evidence. The argument — that Fenech was under the influence of cocaine and therefore lacked full control of his free will — did not persuade the bench. That particular thread of the Caruana Galizia assassination case continues to unspool, slowly, in the courts that will eventually have to hold the whole weight of it.

On a quieter register, something worth noting: twenty-five volunteers gathered around Torri ta' San Luċjan in Marsaxlokk and collected almost 450 kilograms of waste. No minister announced it. No press conference was called. They simply showed up and cleaned the coastline that the rest of us walk past. I have covered enough of this island's failures to say, without irony, that the people who do this work carry more genuine civic dignity than most of the institutions they're cleaning around.

The question of whether parliament's gender corrective mechanism actually serves women will be debated this week — a conversation the island has been circling for years without resolution, which is itself a kind of answer.

And the soldiers are home from Lebanon. Forty years of watching this island, and that sentence still lands somewhere.

The energy deal with BP will be tested the first time global gas prices spike — and that is a question of when, not whether.