Malta’s current COVID-19 situation could have been avoided had precautionary action been taken earlier, Opposition leader Bernard Grech said Friday.

Interviewed by Illum’s Albert Gauci Cunningham on NET TV, Grech said that current measures to limit the spread of the virus were now unavoidable because less drastic ones had not been taken earlier.

Residents of homes for the elderly are still in lockdown despite having been vaccinated, Grech pointed out, adding that while other countries had started to open up, Malta was having to close down 

Grech said Malta’s prime minister, Robert Abela, had taken people for a ride when discussing the pandemic and should shoulder responsibility for the consequences.

People were willing to make sacrifices for the common good, he said, but were told to ignore reality and given false hopes. 

He criticised the situation on buses, saying these were a transmission hotspot where people mixed without control.

PN debts, rent reform

Questioned about the Nationalist Party’s debts, Grech said that the party is honouring all its dues and seeing how it can increase its income to not just pay those debts, but to also have a fund to use for the next general election.

Asked about a reform for properties under a pre-1995 rent law, he said this had last been tackled by a Nationalist government in 2010. The Labour government had not done anything until now and what it had now come up with was “too little, too late”.

Grech argued that what the government is proposing is an "exact replica" of what it had proposed for leases three years ago, in 2018.

Some property owners, he said, will be constrained to avoid court proceedings to ensure they can benefit from the reform proposals, while being unable to get their property back. 

The PN leader argued that the solution to the problem was for the proposals unveiled by the government to be accompanied by an aggressive provision of social accommodation, with owners given the possibility to sell the property to the tenants or their children.

The recently announced reform to outdated rent laws aims to right an unconstitutional law that bars landlords, whose property has been rented out before June 1995, to refuse lease renewal or increase rent to reflect market rates.

On foreign workers, Grech said the country should identify the areas where these are needed, such as the health sector, and push for a drive in that direction.