A female reporter from "Blockchain Island" was assassinated while investigating a mining incident. Two years later, she still cannot be vindicated.

There is a country in the world, which is called the "Blockchain Island" - Malta.

This is a country located in the Mediterranean Sea, which is about the size of a postage stamp on the map. Malta is famous for its rocky coastline, megalithic temples, baroque churches, and centuries of culture. Not only that, it is also a hodgepodge of British immigrants, with luxurious hotels, exotic women, cars driving on the left, and many legacies left by foreign civilizations.

Malta is known as the blockchain island because of its progressive stance on blockchain regulatory policies. It is therefore often mentioned by people in the industry, and many exchanges have even moved in.

But in this country, something happened that made the citizens of this island unbearable.

Female reporter murdered

In October 2017, a journalist named Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated. She was killed by a bomb installed on the car body while driving near her residence. It is said that she revealed a network of corruption before her death, which threatened the interests of the government that actively embraced cryptocurrency. The incident triggered a national march in Malta.

The streets of Malta's capital Valletta were filled this week with shouts of "mafia state" and "murderers". The protests and international scrutiny have put pressure on Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to resign over the national scandal of Daphne's unsolved murder.

Meanwhile, at a nearby gaming conference on Wednesday, Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed inventor of Bitcoin, was preaching the gospel of cryptocurrency and its ability to fight fraud — but he said nothing about what was happening just a few miles away.

For many years, Daphne has made it her mission to expose corruption in Malta, believing that corruption is corroding various government agencies and is gradually spreading to other EU countries.

The question that troubles the people of Malta is: Who ordered her killing?

The main suspect in the case is well-known businessman Yorgen Fenech, who was arrested on November 20 while trying to flee Malta on a luxury yacht. Fenech is the director of Malta's energy supplier ElectroGas, and Daphne's next target was supposed to be the purchasing company, but she was cruelly silenced.

Dramatically, new evidence emerged days after Fenech's arrest, putting the spotlight on government ministers Conrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, who both resigned and were questioned by police, denying any wrongdoing. Schembri is believed to have a close relationship with the prime minister, who is now being called on to resign.

Earlier on Friday, Muscat's cabinet rejected Fenech's request for a pardon, but in exchange for providing information about his accomplices, Fenech has now been released on bail.

Bitcoin Connection

Daphne's son Paul wrote in a blog that before her death his mother had been investigating possible links between Fenech and two politicians, as well as a gas supply deal with Azerbaijan.

In a deal with Azerbaijan’s state oil and gas company Socar, Malta paid nearly double the open market price for its gas. Emails show that in 2018, ElectroGas considered operating a bitcoin mining farm at its facilities.

The letter details a discussion of establishing a Bitcoin mining data warehouse at the country’s main power station, Delimara, and proposes negotiations with the state-owned grid operator (Enemalta) to use its network capacity to export electricity to the warehouse.

The emails are just a small portion of the ElectroGas-related documents that were discovered by Daphne Caruana Galizia shortly before the murders. But bitcoin mining was only a small part of the documents Caruana Galizia used to hook up government officials, who she also accused of running multiple shell companies in the Panama Papers.

ElectroGas Documentation:

https://www.theguardian.com/

Panama Papers:

https://www.theguardian.com/

The island is currently in the grip of a crisis the likes of which it has not seen since the 1960s. How much longer can Malta’s citizens endure this? And what does this mean for the blockchain companies that have been attracted to the island by its “crypto-friendly” policy?

This article comes from "Blockchain Base Camp".