Joseph Muscat
Joseph Muscat was prime minister of Malta from 2013 to January 2020, the Labour leader who won the elections of 2013 and 2017 by the largest margins in the island's history and resigned when the investigation of the car bomb that killed the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in October 2017 reached his own office, with his chief of staff Keith Schembri arrested, his energy minister Mizzi resigned and the businessman Yorgen Fenech, who owned the power-station company they had dealt with and the Panama companies she had written about, charged with commissioning the murder. The seven years were the boom that made Malta the fastest-growing economy in the European Union, on online gambling, financial services, construction and the sale of citizenship to anyone with a million euros. There was the Individual Investor Programme of 2014 that the Commission sued over, and the gas power station built by the Azerbaijani state company and Fenech's consortium on terms that were the country's scandal. There was the hospitals concession to an American company with no hospitals that the courts annulled in 2023 as fraudulent. There were the Panama Papers of 2016 that showed Mizzi and Schembri had opened companies in Panama in his first weeks in office, which he did not sack them for. There were the divorce and civil unions and same-sex marriage legalised in a Catholic country in four years, and the murder. He was born in Pietà in 1974, studied public policy at the University of Malta and took a doctorate at Bristol on the island's economy. He was a journalist for the party's station and a member of the European Parliament from 2004. He took the party at thirty-four in 2008 after its third defeat, making it the party of business as well as the workers. The public inquiry that reported in July 2021 found that the state had created a culture of impunity that led to the murder and that his cabinet bore responsibility. He was charged in May 2024 with corruption, bribery and money laundering over the hospitals deal, which he calls a political vendetta. The trial is pending. He works as a consultant and has been paid by the company that got the hospitals. He remains popular in the party that his successor Abela has kept in power with the same margins, which is the island's judgment on the matter.
- Lived: 1974 CE – ?
- Nationality: Maltese
- Roles: prime minister, politician
