Former Labour Minister Chris Cardona has been named by Vince Muscat known as il-Kohhu as being implicated in an aborted attempt to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2015.

The plot, according to Times of Malta, had fallen through. Cardona has described the implication as “pure evil fiction”.

Earlier this week Muscat pleaded guilty to his involvement in the murder of Caruana Galizia in 2017, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. On the same day of the guilty plea, the police arrested four other persons in connection with the Caruana Galizia murder and that of lawyer Carmel Chircop in Birkirkara in 2015. They were arraigned on Wednesday.

Cardona was said to have been mentioned by Alfred and George Degiorgio, who remain accused of the Caruana Galizia murder, as being behind the aborted plot of 2015. The price was set at €150,000, but no money changed hands and the plan was aborted.

Investigators are believed to be treating this information with caution. Muscat is understood to have told police that he used to drop off Alfred Degiorgio in Merchants Street in Valletta, where Cardona had his office as Economy Minister, but that he had seen him entering the building only once.

Cardona told The Times: “They are also hardly planned by whoever is trying to convince anybody that these lies are true, as Daphne’s fictitious article on the brothel was in January 2017… and so one has to ask: what could have been my motive/and my decision for mandating a heinous crime two years before the publication of that article.”

There are over 600 references to Cardona in Caruana Galizia’s blog: at the time of the alleged plot, the journalist criticised him over his rent-free stay in a Portomaso apartment owned by Silvan Fenech, a cousin of Tumas magnate Yorgen Fenech, accused of being a mastermind in the Caruana Galizia assassination.

Cardona was questioned by the police in in November 2019 soon after Yorgen Fenech’s arrest. Cardona resigned from Labour Party deputy leader last year after not being appointed to the Cabinet by new Prime Minister Robert Abela.

In a reaction, Opposition leader Bernard Grech described the news as “shocking”, and called Prime Minister Robert Abela “an extension of the Muscat Cabinet” for attempting to ride on the success of the police investigations. “If the allegations are true they confirm the familiarity of a Labour government and organised crime; and it leaves no doubt as to the part this government has played in the state of affairs we find ourselves in today.”