A document posted on the government website, containing details that did not tally with the Budget speech, included “measures which the government did not approve”, the Finance Minister said yesterday.

Apart from being uploaded online, the detailed Budget document was also distributed in printed format to MPs on Monday evening.

Addressing a news conference at Castille, Valletta, in which he hailed the “overwhelming positive” response given by the social partners to the Budget, the Prime Minister downplayed the incident, saying it was a “genuine mistake”. He said that the document was immediately removed to avoid confusion.

The measures listed in the Dokument tal-Budget 2016 included the granting of the controversial former Café Premier in the capital for use as the official seat of the Valletta local council and barring vintage cars from using the roads on weekdays. The Vintage and Classic Cars Federation was furious and called on the government to reverse the decision, even going so far as to order their members to boycott a Transport Malta committee.

Contacted by the Times of Malta, Valletta mayor Alexiei Dingli said he was “ecstatic” with the decision that the government had finally agreed to give his council the former Café Premier premises.

“We were never told this good news before, even though we had been lobbying for the place,” he said. However, a short time later all this became doubtful.

The first indication that something was wrong came late in the morning when the document vanished from the government’s website. Then, in the early afternoon, a government statement admitted what the Finance Minister must have dreaded.

What was distributed to MPs was just “a working document” and not the final version of the Budget and included “measures which the government did not approve”, Finance Minister Edward Sciclina pointed out.

The ministry said a ban on classic cars during the week was just a proposal that had not yet been approved by the government.

The Prime Minister later clarified the proposal had been ditched, as it had been concluded that such a measure would not affect traffic congestion.

Regarding the Café Premier proposal, he said the government had upheld the council’s request to relocate its offices to this prime site.

The document in question included a number of measures that were not mentioned by Prof. Scicluna on Budget Day. Among them was a proposal to build new graves at the Addolorata Cemetery, a new home for the elderly in Birkirkara through a public-private partnership, an increase in help to celiacs, with the monthly allowance rising to €45 from €30, and an increase in the allowance for drug addicts, up from €23.29 to €40 a week.

Asked if these proposals were still in the pipeline, the Prime Minister said no decision had been taken due to the tight time frame dictated by the decision to present the Budget a month earlier than usual.

This meant there was not sufficient time to analyse their impact. However, he said such measures could still be implemented later in this legislature.