Momentum Calls on Attorney General to Resign After Recent Acquittals

In a statement reported by Times of Malta, Momentum executive member Matthew Agius said Buttigieg should “take institutional responsibility and resign” after what he described as recurring shortcomings in criminal prosecutions.

The party’s case rests on three examples. Businessman Yorgen Fenech was acquitted of Caruana Galizia’s murder in September. Former soldier Lorin Scicluna was acquitted nearly two months later of the murder of Lassana Cisse in a racially motivated drive-by shooting. In the Ciantar case, prosecutors failed to summon the main witness, and Ciantar was acquitted of possessing a knuckleduster at Mater Dei Hospital.

Momentum’s argument is political, but not vague. It is not complaining in the abstract about standards or tone. It is pointing at prosecutions that failed in court and saying the problem reaches the Office of the Attorney General.

Agius said such failures undermine the institutions responsible for upholding law and order, demoralise officers within the police force and weaken public confidence in safety and security when serious crimes do not lead to convictions. Those are judgments, not findings of fact by a court, but they are the judgments Momentum chose to attach to these cases.

What gives the statement a little more weight than the standard resignation demand is that it did not stop at naming Buttigieg. Momentum also urged the government to present a plan to strengthen the Prosecution Unit within the Attorney General’s office, including better pay, working conditions, staffing, administrative support and clearer opportunities for career development.

That part is less dramatic and probably more important. Criminal justice systems do not only break in spectacular moments. They also break through understaffing, weak retention and procedural failure.

Momentum also called for a transparent framework regulating movement between the prosecution office and private legal practice, including disclosure rules, conflict-of-interest safeguards and cooling-off periods. Agius said those measures would help protect the independence and integrity of prosecution.

The demand, then, is not just that Buttigieg goes. It is that the office she leads has to answer for repeated failures that, in Momentum’s telling, now look less like isolated defeats than a pattern.