Brussels, 16 October 2018 - Ana Gomes (S&D, Portugal) joins today the celebrations in Malta organized by the civil society to pay tribute to Daphne Caruana Galizia, investigative journalist who was murdered, precisely one year ago, when the car she was driving exploded with a bomb.

Ana Gomes met Daphne Caruana Galizia personally, during the first mission of inquiry on the context of the Panama Papers scandal (Committee of Inquiry to investigate alleged contraventions and maladministration in the application of Union law in relation to money laundering, tax avoidance and tax evasion') on February 2017. Soon after her murder, in November 2017, Ana Gomes led an ad hoc mission from the European Parliament to investigate breaches of the rule of law in Malta which aimed precisely at investigating Daphne's murder and other schemes of corruption and money laundering which had arisen out of the Panama Papers and that had been ignored by Joseph Muscat's Maltese government, who never took any action against the corruption scandals.

Ana Gomes returned to Malta on the 1 June 2018, together with two other MEPs, having produced a report denouncing the stalling of the Maltese police investigation over the journalist's murder.

Over the status of the investigation to Malta, Ana Gomes notes: "The government of Joseph Muscat claims to be a Labour government. I see nothing of the left or of social-democracy in the corrupt and shady contracts his government has celebrated and which Daphne Caruana Galizia investigated and denounced. Nor do I see any socialism in the continuous and scandalous obstructions to justice and to a serious and independent investigation to her murder. Nor I understand how one can claim to be socialist and maintain a government composed of crooks, money launderers and tax evaders such as Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, chief of office and minister of Joseph Muscat respectively, both exposed in the Panama Papers. It is time for the true socialists and social-democrats in the Party of European Socialists to distance themselves from Muscat's government, one which gives a bad reputation to its political family".

For further information:

Office of MEP Ana Gomes
+351 91 933 24 00
+ 32 (0)2 284 7824
anamaria.gomes@europarl.europa.eu
https://twitter.com/AnaGomesMEP
https://www.facebook.com/anagomesmep