‘I lied about payment to police commissioner’ – Melvin Theuma

Pardoned middleman Melvin Theuma has admitted that claims he made about former Police Commissioner Lawrence Cutajar being paid thousands of euros were untrue, as defence lawyers continued a fierce cross-examination aimed at undermining his credibility in the Yorgen Fenech murder trial.

During another tense sitting, defence lawyer Gianella de Marco confronted Theuma with his own secretly recorded conversations, in which he spoke about payments of €15,000 and €16,000 involving the former police commissioner.

Theuma acknowledged making the claims but told the court they were a “bluff”, insisting Cutajar had never taken money from him and had never supplied him with information.

“I’m saying where I told the truth and where I didn’t,” Theuma told the court after de Marco accused him of repeatedly changing his versions.

In another heated exchange, Theuma conceded that his claims had tarnished Cutajar’s reputation.

“You’re right, I tarnished his name,” he said, while insisting: “I had no contact with the police commissioner.”

The admission formed part of a sustained attempt by Fenech’s defence to distinguish between what Theuma said in recordings made before his arrest and what he is now telling jurors under oath.

The defence also returned to Theuma’s previous claims concerning disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff Keith Schembri.

Theuma said he had once assumed Schembri and Fenech were acting together and had given Fenech recordings, a photograph with Schembri and documents relating to his government job so that Fenech could show them to Schembri.

Asked whether the two men had actually been “in it together”, Theuma replied: “No, they weren’t.”

De Marco suggested that Theuma had instead been using the material to blackmail Fenech for money, an allegation he denied.

Theuma also told the court that while he feared Schembri because he believed he “would do anything for Yorgen”, Schembri had never paid him or instructed him to murder Daphne Caruana Galizia.

“If you want to pin it on Keith Schembri, that’s up to you. But I can’t say anything about him, because he never gave me money and never told me to go kill her,” he testified.

Despite admitting that some of his recorded claims were false, Theuma remained adamant about his central accusation against Fenech.

He repeated that Fenech commissioned Caruana Galizia’s assassination and provided €150,000 for the murder.

Theuma said €30,000 was handed over upfront and another €120,000 following the assassination, with additional money paid for binoculars bought by the hitmen.

“There’s only one truth,” Theuma told de Marco when she challenged his version: that Yorgen Fenech “ta’ Tumas” gave him €150,000 to have Caruana Galizia killed.

The cross-examination also returned to the circumstances surrounding Theuma’s presidential pardon. De Marco suggested that a cryptic reference in one recording to something having been “accepted” concerned an agreement to grant Theuma a pardon in exchange for implicating Fenech.

Theuma rejected the suggestion, insisting he had obtained the pardon “the right way”, although he said he could not remember what the reference to something being “accepted” meant.

Theuma’s cross-examination continues.