Żeppi l-Ħafi Is Gone: The Pardon That Never Stopped Costing

Joseph Fenech died at 71. The man Malta knew as Żeppi l-Ħafi — barefoot Żeppi, the name carrying its own mythology — is gone, and with him closes one of the stranger chapters in the republic's criminal and political history. He was not a statesman. He was not a hero. But he occupied a space in the Maltese imagination that no amount of official discomfort could erase, because the state itself had handed him the pen and asked him to sign his way back to legitimacy.

The presidential pardon that returned Żeppi l-Ħafi to freedom shook this island in ways that polite company still struggles to fully discuss. That a sitting president could exercise such discretion on behalf of a convicted criminal — and that the political fallout would be measured not in resignations but in silence — told you something essential about how power operates here. Not through confrontation, but through accommodation. The Knights who built these walls understood that arrangement. So did every government since independence.

His death lands on a Sunday evening already weighted with news that pulls in several directions at once. On the buses and in the public spaces of Blata l-Bajda and Rabat, police detained 34 people in immigration inspections — the nationalities named in the press release, the legal basis unremarked upon. Newsbook frames it plainly as a post-election crackdown gathering pace. I will frame it the same way. When a government wins an election and within weeks begins conducting identity checks on public transport, the timing is the message. Robert Abela's Labour did not invent this politics, but it has clearly decided not to resist it either.

Elsewhere, Enemalta has quietly buried something significant. The SOCAR fixed-price model — a ten-year arrangement that cost Malta seven times the market rate for gas — has been abandoned in favour of a market-linked deal that runs until May 2027. Robert Abela announced the BP LNG agreement himself, which tells you the government considers it a win. Given that European gas prices have fallen sharply, they may be right on the economics. But the original SOCAR contract, which locked this island into ruinous pricing while someone somewhere was presumably satisfied with the arrangement, deserves more than a footnote in a press release. I would like to know what it cost in total. I suspect the number exists somewhere and is not being volunteered.

There is one lighter note: the Maltese film *Żejtune* has won the audience award at the Mediterranean Film Festival in Split. Small country, small crew, second international award. In a week when the immigration figures and the energy deals and the death of a pardoned criminal have dominated the conversation, it is worth recording that something made here moved an audience in Croatia. The island contains multitudes, as it always has.

The Gozo Channel will soon have a new CEO in Ronald Sultana. The promises that come with that appointment will be tested on a route that Gozitans have been complaining about for longer than some of its passengers have been alive.