Our top five investigations in 2025

It is no coincidence that our top investigations are all stories that the public was never meant to even know about.

While our top news articles for 2025 kept you refreshing for updates about developing stories, our investigations turned closely guarded secrets into our most widely read headlines.

As we mark the end of another year soaked in scandal, The Shift’s team takes a look at the biggest investigations we published in 2025, ranked in order of popularity and impact.

Dizz Group to offload Tigné mall to pay bond

Tigné shopping mall, which is owned by wife and husband couple Diane and Karl Izzo of Dizz Group, became the subject of a forced sale agreement to prevent defaulting on an €8 million bond that is set to mature next year.

While the deal is yet to be confirmed after The Shift first published its investigation in August, the group’s debts and bond repayment dues leave it with very little wriggle room.

The real meat of the story lies beyond the agreement that confirmed the lede: The context of how the Izzos rose to prominence due to the couple’s close associations with disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat and his wife, Michelle, explains the investigation’s staying power.

Muscat was at the height of his power in 2016 – the same year the government approved the lease transfer that preceded the shopping mall’s development.

Karl Izzo was also appointed as Malta’s ambassador to Montenegro, and even accompanied Muscat on an official visit to the Balkan country where the scandalous Mozura wind farm deal was finalised.

Dizz Group’s financial straits also formed part of a broader wave of concern about major companies in Malta struggling to repay bondholders to the tune of millions of euro, a trend that The Shift has also consistently reported on throughout 2025, including MIDI’S Manoel Island concession and the Malta Maritime Hub.

Lands Authority insider wins property tender by €1

Anyone who’s ever done an honest day’s work in public procurement knows the frustration of having spent weeks filling in paperwork to make sure your bid’s in order, only to then find out that the contract’s been awarded to someone else.

Now try to imagine finding out that the only person who outbid you did so by just €1 and also just so happens to be a regular beneficiary of favourable treatment from the same authority that adjudicated your bid.

In the case of a tender for a plot of government-owned land on St Publius Street in Sliema, that is exactly what happened, as our investigation published in August revealed.

Simon Muscat, the owner of the petrol station abutting Manoel Island in Gżira, submitted a bid for the plot in question for a total of €9,251, outbidding another company, Endo Properties Ltd, which was otherwise the highest bidder among several others.

Given that the odds of submitting such a perfectly valued bid without illegally knowing about what other bidders offered are next to nothing, it stands to reason that Muscat could not have pulled this off without insider knowledge – an assertion that the Lands Authority never bothered to deny.

At least €860,000 in taxpayer money down the drain as Malta Enterprise beneficiary vanishes

Never ones to miss out on hype, the Maltese government is betting big on anything with AI slapped on it, going so far as to earmark €100 million from its 2026 budget for AI and other prominent digital technologies to attract investors.

As with every other hype train, for every single unicorn company whose product revolutionises entire sectors, there will be dozens of charlatans and frauds who exploit the hype without providing anything of substance.

In that context, Pera Labs Malta’s “AI-powered sperm analysis devices for fertility clinics” should have set off at least a few alarm bells over at Malta Enterprise, especially when considering that artificial intelligence had just taken the world by storm when ChatGPT’s first public-facing model was released in 2022, which is when Pera Labs showed up on the local scene.

And yet, when Turkish national Burak Özkösem applied for Malta Enterprise funding worth €800,000, the agency supported the project. Özkösem was even allowed to lease property on a government-owned industrial site, only to disappear entirely, leaving over €60,000 in unpaid rent and not one AI-powered sperm analysis device to show for it.

REVEALED: The full extent of Ċaqnu’s ‘savage’ development in Xemxija

Perhaps due to its location – situated in front of the bay’s wide open space, clearly visible from the promenade across it – Xemxija serves as a glaring reminder of what Malta’s broken planning regime looks like in practice.

Though Xemxija’s Local Plan clearly stipulates that the area was meant to cater solely for low-rise developments and villas, the once small seaside town now looks like a burgeoning hive of apartment complexes, with one infamous developer’s ongoing major project destined to dominate the entire area.

In September, The Shift published an investigation which exposed how developer Charles Polidano, known to most as iċ-Ċaqnu, plans to build over 150 apartments spread across 11 storeys, complete with an underground 665 car space park drilled straight into a fragile clay slope and an adjacent 64-room hotel, in addition to over 20,000 sqm of commercial area.

EXCLUSIVE: Johann Grech’s secret list for gala revealed

Another exclusive investigation we published this summer exposed how Film Commissioner Johann Grech, known for his habitual overspending of taxpayer money, invited 1,500 guests to the Golden Bee gala – most of whom had little to no connection with the film industry.

While both Culture Minister Owen Bonnici and the Film Commissioner himself have furiously resisted multiple attempts to hold them accountable for spending, including by refusing to disclose information, The Shift nonetheless managed to obtain a copy of the guest list.

Though several Labour MPs and senior government figures did attend Grech’s self-promoting pageant, the guest list also revealed that almost all Cabinet members, except for Economy Minister Silvio Schembri and Environment Minister Miriam Dalli, declined the invitation.

Grech continues to hold onto his seat of power with the continuous assistance of the government’s representatives on Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, escaping accountability for his poor handling of a sector where local talent struggles to compete with generous subsidies for major foreign productions.