The prime minister was showing himself weak in the Rosianne Cutajar controversy because he too had had his snout in the trough, the Nationalist Party said on Wednesday.

Cutajar resigned from the Labour parliamentary group on Monday, two weeks after the publication of chats she exchanged with Yorgen Fenech where she said, among other things, that she was taking a consultancy job at the Institute of Tourism Studies and did not care because everyone had his snout to the trough.

PN General Secretary Michael Piccinino and MP Claudette Buttigieg pointed out at a press conference that at the same time as Rosianne Cutajar wrote that everyone was making a pig of himself, Robert Abela was being paid  €17,000 per month for part-time work at the Planning Authority.

The culture of ma jimpurtanix, kulħadd jitħanżer (I don't care, everyone is making a pig of himself - Cutajar's words) was a precise summary of the 10 years of Labour government, the PN officials said. 

Cutajar's departure from the parliamentary group was not enough, they insisted, and the prime minister now needed to act against those who had made pigs of themselves and were still doing so. But Abela could hardly act when he was one of them. He had been earning more per month from a part-time job than what many people made from a full-time job in a year, they observed. 

Robert Abela could not be believed when he said his heart was with the workers, since he was always defending the powerful and well-off. He had forgotten about the plight of, among others, nurses and midwives, social workers, teachers and the police. 

The Labour Party was no longer the workers' party it once was, the PN officials said.