They kept you glued to your screen, darting in and out of comments sections to read what people are saying about them.

They elicited your anger, your disbelief, and sometimes, made you laugh at the absurdity of it all.

The common thread that emerges from them is clear: you want to know who’s breaking the rules and getting away with it, and you want us to hold them accountable.

These are The Shift’s top 10 news stories of the year, ranked according to how many of you read them and the impact that they left on Malta’s landscape at large.

The Capo Crudo affair

Capo Crudo was an illegal restaurant built on public land.

Sitting at the very top of our list, our story about Capo Crudo’s blatantly illegal operations was this year’s most widely read story.

The Valletta restaurant’s illegal activities, which lasted from 2017 to earlier this year when it finally closed its doors, were tolerated by authorities thanks to the owner’s direct connections with some of the government’s most high-profile executives in disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s Cabinet.

The restaurant itself was initially a regatta club that was illegally converted into a fine-dining eatery.

The owners, Keith Seychell and his associate, Marvin Scicluna, accrued a total of €50,000 in fines from the Planning Authority following the issuance of an enforcement notice seeking the removal of the illegal structures.

Last month, the restaurant closed its doors while still refusing to pay the fine. An appeal filed by the owners was withdrawn following an undisclosed out-of-court settlement.

St John’s Co-Cathedral project’s mismanagement

St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta.

The Shift’s exclusive stories about severe mismanagement in one of Malta’s most revered historical buildings, St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, drew an unsurprising amount of concern from many of our readers.

While one of our first scoops exposing a cave-in at St John’s was the most-read in our series of stories about the subject, our follow-up articles ensured that the exposé didn’t get buried in the rubble of an attempted cover-up.

Originally scheduled to reopen to the public in 2018, St John’s Co-Cathedral’s doors remain closed since the project’s myriad planning issues led to millions of euro in cost overruns.

As recently as this month, The Shift reported new delays expected to follow a major contractor’s decision to challenge an €8.7 million contract for finishing works. AX Group challenged the tender because the contract was allegedly vitiated by a lack of transparency and flawed evaluation.

€42,000 for the minister’s brother to transport vegetables

Ino Abela campaigning for his brother, then-Labour Party candidate Jo Etienne Abela, using his transportation truck.

To this day, we’re not sure why so many of our readers engaged with a story about how the Health Minister’s brother, Ino Abela, was paid €42,000 over nine months to transport vegetables to and fro Malta’s national food market, il-Pitkalija.

It certainly wasn’t one of the major abuses of public procurement we’ve ever exposed, an abuse which has all but become habitual rather than exceptional.

It didn’t involve the usual cast of suspects, offshore intrigue, or even a particularly well-known state institution, either.

Our best guess is that the story resonated so much because of the shameless, open abuse of public funds to provide a service that could have easily been procured elsewhere at a much better value for money for taxpayers. It was so obvious it was almost insulting to even have to point it out.

Abela’s ill-fated decision to plaster his brother’s name on one of his delivery trucks while posing for a photo also probably helped.

Malita plc runs out of cash

The social housing project in Ħal Farruġ, Luqa.

The Shift’s story about a massive social housing project in Luqa grinding to a halt due to Malita Investments plc’s liquidity crisis was the one loose thread that needed to be pulled for a minister’s entire career to come apart.

Following one revelation after another about the state-backed Malita’s abysmal financial situation and a stream of contentious resignations from the company’s board of directors, Housing Minister Roderick Galdes continues to resist widespread calls for his resignation.

Though those issues on their own should already be more than enough to warrant the minister’s resignation, Galdes continues to claim he has done no wrong, even as more reports exposed how authorities within his ministry sealed deals with the same developers with whom Galdes was privately negotiating.

And speaking of developers…

Mercury Towers’ €12.7m ‘debt’

Developer Joseph Portelli being interviewed, with a mock-up of Mercury Towers in the background.

Few developers can claim the dubious honour of being one of the most well-known names in the construction industry as much as Joseph Portelli.

As the owner of Malta’s tallest high-rise building and as the president of Ħamrun Spartans football club, Portelli’s name is often in the headlines due to the blatant disregard for planning laws that he and his associates have shown throughout countless developments across Malta and Gozo.

Mercury Towers, a sprawling multi-building complex in the heart of Paceville that features both residential and commercial elements, is widely regarded as the centrepiece of Portelli’s sprawling property empire.

Within the context of Portelli’s flamboyant declarations about owing his philanthropic contributions to his raging success, news of Portelli’s Mercury Towers Ltd registering a €12.7 million loss in 2024 spread like wildfire after The Shift’s story about it in June of this year.

Though Mercury’s leadership was bullish about the odds of recouping losses and recovering massive debts, it remains to be seen whether the Gozitan developer’s towers will prove to be the crown jewels that Portelli says they are or a monument to his hubris.

Trouble with MMH bonds

The massive site in the Grand Harbour given to Mediterranean Maritime Hub (MMH).

Our biggest stories have always been about deals which are sold to the public as private investments that will benefit everyone, only to turn out later to have all the makings of another rug pull. The Mediterranean Maritime Hub (MMH) project is no different.

Operating in what was once known as Marsa Shipyard, MMH is a private consortium that took over the shipyard with the express intent of reviving an ailing public asset, but has instead continued to bleed money.

Despite the fact that Malta boasts of one of the world’s biggest shipping registries and occupies an enviable strategic position in the central Mediterranean, MMH’s failure to rein in liabilities scared off one potential investor after another, with the latest reports suggesting that last-minute negotiations with wealthy tuna ranchers are currently ongoing.

In particular, a looming €15 million bond repayment continues to weigh heavily on the consortium, with its own auditors expressing “significant doubt” about the consortium’s ability to repay bondholders.

The Head of the consortium, Paul Abela, meanwhile, bought a luxury villa in Spain.

The hospitals heist 

Ivan Vassallo, the owner of Technoline, was ordered to sell some of his assets to pay off growing debts.

No end-of-year round up can be complete without an obligatory reference to the biggest exit scam of all: the hospitals concession.

In September, The Shift published a story detailing how Ivan Vassallo, the owner of the hijacked hospitals supplier Technoline, was forced to sell some of his assets to cover Technoline’s growing debts.

Technoline was one of dozens of local and offshore companies used by the leading players in the hospitals concession to siphon taxpayer money away from the concession itself and into investors’ hands.

Following a court case and a subsequent appeal, which declared the concession fraudulent and illegal, Vassallo, Technoline, and a couple of dozen other conspirators involved in the deal are currently facing criminal charges.

Given that Vassallo’s assets were subject to a freezing order, Technoline’s owner was forced to sell off unrelated assets to cover €300,000 in accumulated debts.

Fired CEO reinstated in €92,000 job, months after golden handshake

The Gozo Regional Development Association’s CEO, Ivan Falzon.

If there is one guarantee that the Labour Party can claim to give to any of its loyalists, it’s the promise of falling upward even when you are sacked to make way for another loyalist.

Now fulfilling the role of the Gozo Regional Development Association’s CEO on a €92,000 salary, Ivan Falzon previously held the role of CEO at Infrastructure Malta before being ousted to make way for failed Labour MEP candidate Steve Ellul.

A relatively simple change in personnel from one CEO to another cost taxpayers €142,000, thanks to Infrastructure Minister Chris Bonett’s decision to remove Falzon from his post over strategic disagreements about how Malta’s traffic problems should be handled.

The GRDA is seen mainly as a nominal association with virtually no enforcement or decision-making powers.

Song festival turned into €500,000 direct orders contest

Claire Agius, Keith Demicoli and Moira Delia paid €7,500 each via direct orders.

Another consistent feature of this administration’s style of governance is the wholesale conversion of public funds into a vehicle for private appeasement.

The Shift’s reporting exposed how one Maltese song festival known as Mużika Mużika cost taxpayers at least half a million euro in direct orders.

TV presenters Claire Agius, Keith Demicoli, and Moira Delia were each paid €7,500 for their role. Comedian and presenter Ray Calleja was paid €7,000 for a special guest appearance.

Camera crews and equipment alone cost €89,000, all of which went to former ONE and NET operators who went on to open their own commercial ventures.

Though reporting on this scale of corruption has become painfully routine in the grand scheme of things, the enduring popularity of this story among our readers shows that people may not be so desensitised to corruption after all, even if the initiative being funded by it is a somewhat popular music festival.

Freezing order against Christian Borg reduced

Christian Borg, 31, an alleged kidnapper and cocaine dealer, accumulated immense wealth.

Filed in the category of ‘you think you read the headline wrong, but you actually had it right the first time’, this story about alleged kidnapper and trafficker Christian Borg‘s freezing order being reduced to €52 million and a long list of properties and cars attests to just how large his empire became over the years.

The news report about the court’s freezing orders on Borg’s assets also highlights how law enforcement evidently held back from thoroughly investigating Borg’s activities.

Borg only ended up in law enforcement’s crosshairs after a botched kidnapping led to his name being plastered all over the news, and he is now facing a raft of criminal charges, such as VAT fraud, money laundering, and grievous bodily harm charges relating to the kidnapping itself.