Bringing the whole house down: Melvin Theuma

Melvin Theuma has secured his freedom and his place in history but not his conscience. Among all the criminals brought to Court only he seems to show a genuine sign of regret over his actions and he will die with the regret that he contributed to the murder of a woman, a mother and a journalist – something excessive even by the standards of the criminal underworld.

Ultimately, it is also Yorgen Fenech’s and Keith Schembri’s incompetence and excessive sense of impunity that gave away too much, to the extent of enabling Melvin Theuma to bring them down. Melvin Theuma recounted that he had been a family friend of the Fenech family since its patriarch, Tumas, was alive. Yorgen Fenech thought he could easily turn his grandfather’s empire into an allegedly criminal, murderous machine only because he was enabled by Castille. The extent of this enabling should be scrutinised and investigated by the Police through an extensive investigation that goes beyond the corruption of Electrogas and also examines the direct and indirect enabling of Yorgen Fenech in relation to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

If you want to frame it ideologically, you can also say that Melvin Theuma was a result of the excesses of Castille’s corruption: as corruption became extreme, the boundaries between sophisticated financial crime and the straightforward criminal underworld became completely blurred, enabling Melvin Theuma to get a direct taste of real and unencumbered criminal power.