A scandal involving Clayton Bartolo, Clint Camilleri and Bartolo’s wife Amanda Muscat should be the subject of a police investigation, the Green Party has argued.
ADPD secretary general Ralph Cassar said the trio should be charged with criminal association and fraud, and challenged the police commission to “do his duty” instead of standing by those who “defraud the people.”
“This is another case in which the Commissioner appears to be spineless with those in power and a bully to those who steal a tin of tuna because they are hungry,” Cassar said.
The scandal concerns manoeuvres by Bartolo and Camilleri to secure a fake ministry consultancy job for Muscat, who was dating Bartolo at the time.
Muscat was first made a consultant within Bartolo’s ministry and then moved to Camilleri’s. But she never did any work as a consultant, had no qualifications to justify that role and continued to work as Bartolo’s secretary throughout.
A parliamentary committee this week resolved to admonish Bartolo and Camilleri and order Muscat to refund the balance between what she was meant to be earning and what she actually made. Bartolo was also instructed to apologise to parliament.
The prime minister, Robert Abela, has made it clear that he sees no reason for Camilleri to be sacked as minister. Bartolo was sacked and kicked out of Labour’s parliamentary group after Abela learnt that Times of Malta was to reveal that Bartolo and Muscat are the subject of a money laundering probe concerning an unrelated affair.
In a new conference on Saturday ADPD said the parliamentary committee’s decisions were “scandalous” and that Speaker Anġlu Farrugia had effectively “granted guilty parties an easy pass” through his casting vote.
ADPD public relations officer Brian Decelis said the prime minister appeared to be favouring loyalty to those around him over rectitude and ethical politics
The steps taken by the Standards Committee are the minimum, Decelis said.
“The abuse of power cannot be treated superficially and taken simply as a misunderstanding. It must be treated as a crime.”
The ADPD speakers said the affair was proving them right – the country need constitutional change to allow more than two parties into parliament, to scrutinise a system that the country’s two large parties have allowed to deteriorate “for decades”.