There is need to introduce public sector involvement in a number of strategic sectors in the same way as has been done with Enemalta, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said this morning.

Without going into specifics, Dr Muscat said there were strategic sectors which needed reform in order to become more efficient and to save jobs.

The private sector needed to be involved in these sectors, Dr Muscat said when speaking in Zurrieq.  The government would safeguard the national interest while the private sector would introduce new management and efficiency.

In his speech Dr Muscat underlined the 'optimism’ which he said the people in general, businesses and the country were feeling.

Prices and inflation were at a historic low, salaries were rising and there were more jobs, he said.

The deficit and the debt were going down, as were taxes.

The country was performing an economic miracle, in contrast to what was happening in many other countries, and Malta had been praised by the European Commission.

Next month the government would also be cutting the electricity tariffs for businesses by a quarter, leaving €50 million in the country every year. The same power cuts were given to families as of last year, leaving a further €30m in the country.

These were results which made Malta the best in Europe.

Dr Muscat referred to his visit to Berlin last week and said Germany would give technical help to Malta to set up a development bank to ease access to finance for businesses.

The Development Bank would also assist the government in major infrastructural projects that would also utilise EU funds.

COURT SENTENCE

Referring briefly to last Friday's Constitutional Court decision, Dr Muscat said the Constitution was amended some years ago to ensure that the number of seats in parliament was proportional to the number of votes.

The government, he said, respected the will of the people and had a duty to appeal the court sentence. Had this case happened in the last legislature, when the PN won by 1,000 votes, the government would have collapsed as the PN would have a one seat deficit.

The court sentence did not worry the government, which had a comfortable majority and was confident in the people, but it could not have a precedent which in the future could see a court overturn the people's decision.

The government would respect the courts while he would urge the people to show the leader of the opposition on April 11 during the local elections what their views were, Dr Muscat said.

Dr Muscat said Labour was going into the local elections as the underdog.

He said the party as going into the elections with a deficit of six seats because of reforms which had changed the allocation of seats in the councils - Zurrieq, for example, predominantly Labour, would have two fewer seats.

TESTS OF LEADERSHIP

Dr Muscat said Opposition leader Simon Busuttil currently had two tests to his  leadership. What would he do, he said, over the case where a former minister stopped disciplinary action against soldiers accused of beating up a migrant who later died?

This case, he said, gained in importance last week when a soldier was imprisoned for tampering with evidence in another case where a migrant was killed after being beaten.

In the second test, Dr Muscat said, the people still had to see what Dr Busuttil would do over Nationalist MP Toni Bezzina who, according to the findings of an inquiry, had asked government workers to do work in a PN club, and later forced them to sign a false declaration.

The only thing Dr Busuttil had done so far was to give new positions to these people, Dr Muscat observed.