Cutajar drops defamation case on Yorgen relationship allegations in bid to rejoin Labour

The independent MP Rosianne Cutajar has announced she will drop defamation proceedings against Mark Camilleri for allegations made on her private life in the book A Rentseeker's Paradise.

Cutajar claimed that in her bid to be reintegrated into the Labour parliamentary group she was ousted from in the wake of the publication of private WhatsApp chats with Yorgen Fenech. The chats, drawn from evidence against Fenech in the charges against him for masterminding the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, preceeded her expulsion from the Labour parliamentary group.

Cutajar announced her decision to discontinue the defamation case against Camilleri on Facebook. “Friends, every person has priorities that in life change according to circumstances. I recently requested to be brought back into Labour’s party structures. In full respect of this process, I feel these legal proceedings filed three years back are not useful or important, apart from the effect this has on my private life and that of my newborn daughter.”

Cutajar claimed that no court-awarded damages would bring her any justice for the “cruel and insensitive actions [I have] suffered.”

Cutajar resigned from the Labour Party parliamentary group under pressure of the publication of the chats, which are also the subject of a breach of a court order to safeguard the evidence in the case against Fenech.

Cutajar was however also given an ultimatum by Prime Minister Robert Abela to resign or else be kicked out by the PL executive.

Abela’s decision came in the wake of the publication of the damning WhatsApp exchanges with murder suspect Yorgen Fenech from 2019: in one exchange, Cutajar told Fenech she would seek a consultancy with the Institute for Tourism Studies to emulate “everyone pigging out at the trough”. She did in fact get an ITS consultancy.

The storm erupted after author and blogger Mark Camilleri published a transcript of the unredacted Whatsapp chats, revealing a very intimate relationship with Fenech.

The exchanges showed that at the same time Cutajar was arguing against a Council of Europe resolution on Malta in which Fenech’s secret Dubai company 17 Black was also flagged, she was receiving money and expensive gifts from him that were never declared. This was before Fenech was charged with Caruana Galizia’s murder, but after he was outed as owner of 17 Black and its connection to other secret Panama companies owned by former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri.

Cutajar had already been forced to resign from equality parliamentary secretary in 2021 after an ethics investigation detailing her role as a broker of sorts in a property deal involving Yorgen Fenech.

An inquiry by the Standards Commissioner came on the back of reports in MaltaToday and the Times of Malta that Cutajar had been promised a brokerage fee from the sale of an Mdina palazzo to Fenech.