Robert Abela said on Monday that during his time as legal advisor to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, he was not aware that Neville Gafa served as Malta’s envoy in Libya during migration talks in Tripoli.
“I only learnt of his visits [to Libya] from what was being reported in the media,” Robert Abela, now prime minister, said in reply to a series of parliamentary questions filed by Opposition MP Claudette Buttigieg.
A former official at the Office of the Prime Minister during Muscat’s administration, Gafa’s official role had been concealed for months until the government admitted he was Malta’s envoy in Libya.
Though he was not retained when Prime Minister Robert Abela took office last January, he recently made headlines after he testified in court that he had coordinated the “pushback” to Libya of 51 migrants involved in a tragedy over Easter on the instruction of the OPM.
However, the prime minister refuted such claims saying the government had only sought Gafa’s help in view of the latter’s contacts in Libya, while denying that there had been any pushback at all.
Opposition MP Buttigieg asked Abela to outline Gafa's during these visits to Libya, given that there was no agreement between Malta and the Libyan coast guard on how to handle irregular migrants. Buttigieg also asked if Abela had been aware of Gafa’s role, in the first half of this legislature when the was the legal advisor of the then prime minister Joseph Muscat.
In a terse reply, Abela said that as indicated by his predecessor, Gafa was representing the Maltese government during these visits, while emphasising that he was no longer part of the OPM secretariat.
Furthermore, he pointed out that he was not aware of Gafa’s role when he was Muscat’s advisor and he only learnt about the matter from media reports.
Buttigieg also asked for all of Gafa’s employment contracts with State entities to be tabled in parliament. But the prime minister declined, saying he had nothing to add to the reply given to a previous parliamentary question on the matter.
That previous question, dating back to July last year, showed that Gafa served as a customer care assistant at the health ministry from June 2013 to April 2014, projects director at the foundation for medical services between April 2014 and December 2018, and finally a coordinator at the OPM from January 2019 onwards. There was no reference to his missions in Libya.
The Opposition MP also asked if the prime minister was going to order an investigation into claims of the existence of an unofficial agreement between Malta and the Libyan coast guard on migration. That claim had emerged during the public inquiry related to the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Abela replied that institutions were free to launch any investigations they felt appropriate.