A widening investigation into allegations of high-level corruption on the island of Malta, first leveled by murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, stretches to China and a $400 million investment into Europe by a Chinese state power company, Reuters has found.
Caruana Galizia was murdered in October 2017 as she investigated a web of companies that she believed were funneling bribes to Maltese politicians.
Now, Reuters and a consortium of journalists have traced two firms involved in that web to relatives of a senior Chinese executive for Accenture, the global consultancy firm. The executive, 43-year-old Chen Cheng from Shanghai, negotiated investments on behalf of China's state-owned Shanghai Electric Power in Malta and in another small European state, Montenegro, over the past decade, according to Maltese officials and official records.