A single road project by the Gozo Ministry ended up going €10.5 million over its allotted budget, earning the ministry a rebuke from the National Audit Office.
In its report on the ministry’s public accounts from last year, the NAO among others looked at the major infrastructural project on the arterial road that spans from Triq l-Imġarr in Nadur and ends in Triq Sant'Antnin in Għajnsielem.
When Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri announced the project in 2020, he said that it would cost some €8 million, but the NAO found that the final cost of construction reached €17 million, with a further €1.5 million incurred for ancillary costs.
The auditor general criticised the spending in his report, saying that inadequate planning had potentially led to the subsequent increase in costs.
Initially, a budget of €1.8 million was set out for emergency repair works to be carried out on the road. An initial contract worth €652,207 was struck, but this had to later be scrapped after it turned out that the road was in a far more dire condition than initially envisaged.
The ministry then entered into a second contract of €9.3 million with the same contractor for the works, but when it became evident that the upper limit for variations and modifications was going to be reached, a third contract of €6.7 million was signed to cover the remaining works.
The NAO also flagged the fact that it experienced significant delays in obtaining all the necessary information from the ministry in order to conduct the audit, as well as poor record-keeping which made it difficult to keep track of how works were carried out.
In a statement on Wednesday, shadow ministers Mark Anthony Sammut and Alex Borg said that the report was a further indictment of Camilleri’s leadership and another instance of him squandering public funds.
“Just weeks after the €70,000 phantom consultancy scandal involving Minister Clint Camilleri granting a contract to the wife of former Minister Clayton Bartolo, it has become evident that this was not an isolated incident but part of a repeated pattern of public fund mismanagement by Minister Clint Camilleri,” they said.
The NAO report, they continued, highlighted not only a lack of planning and incompetence but a lack of transparency in how public funds were managed.
Sammut and Borg said that in the 2025 Budget votes approved in parliament this week, the Gozo Ministry needed an additional €13.4 million in supplementary expenditure beyond its approved budget for this year.
This is while Gozo’s capital expenditure was reduced by €5 million despite Gozo’s infrastructure requiring “urgent attention” they said.
“It is clear that Minister Clint Camilleri not only acted irresponsibly with public funds in the consultancy case involving his colleague’s wife but also cannot be trusted with public funds in any circumstance,” they said.
“This reckless abuse of funds continues with the endorsement of Prime Minister Robert Abela, who has kept Minister Clint Camilleri in his post despite clear evidence of mismanagement and untrustworthiness with public funds.”
They reiterated previous calls for Camilleri to step down as minister and said it was clear that he was not fit for purpose.