The standout story of the year is the Degiorgio brothers’ sensational admission of guilt, on the first day of their trial by jury, to carrying out the 2017 murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The two triggermen in the car bombing that claimed the life of the 53-year-old veteran journalist pleaded guilty, just two days short of the fifth-year anniversary of her assassination. The plea was made a mere nine hours into the start of their murder trial in October.

George Degiorgio, 58, known as iċ-Ċiniż and his brother Alfred Degiorgio, 56, known as il-Fulu, entered their admission shortly after the midday break at 3pm, reversing their earlier plea of not guilty. They received a 40-year prison sentence.

The third assassin, Vincent Muscat had received a 15-year sentence in 2021 after pleading guilty at a pre-trial stage.The man indicted for conspiracy and complicity to commit the murder, millionaire heir Yorgen Fenech, remains in preventive custody awaiting a date for his trial.

In a connected case, Jamie Vella, who is indicted on charges relating to the procurement of the bomb, together with brothers Adrian and Robert Agius and George Degiorgio, unsuccessfully requested the judge slated to preside his future trial by jury to recuse herself.

In January, Vince Muscat ‘il-Koħħu’, currently serving time for the Caruana Galizia murder was due to go on trial for his part in the 2010 failed armed robbery of HSBC headquarters. The prosecution’s star witness was Muscat’s fellow conspirator Daren Debono ‘it-Topo’. It emerged that right on the eve of the trial, Debono’s lawyers had brokered a secret plea deal with the Attorney General, under which he would admit the charges and receive a 10-year sentence in return for his testimony against Muscat and other conspirators.

News that the public prosecutor had agreed to drop attempted murder charges against Debono, who had fired 65 shots at police officers during the heist, led the Malta Police Union to express its disgust and memorably invite Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg and her staff to “the next gun fight, to experience what death looks like when it is so near”.

But despite receiving the reduced sentence under the plea deal, once the sentence was confirmed, Debono simply refused to identify his accomplices anyway, citing fears for his safety. He got 6 months for contempt of court.

That same month, another magistrate slammed the bungled prosecution of Christian Borg, an associate and erstwhile client of the Prime Minister, which had led to his acquittal on charges of illegally employing foreign workers. In a separate case, Borg is accused, together with four others, of having kidnapped and threatened a man in January this year.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, being charged with kidnapping, recidivism as well as being the subject of a criminal investigation into drug dealing and money laundering rackets was no obstacle to his car rental companies winning tenders by LESA (a week before his arrest in January 2022) and Transport Malta (April 2022), worth upwards of €300,000 in total. Nothing to see here, move along.