Updated at 4.12 pm with amended PN statement.
Education Minister Justyne Caruana should be kicked out of the Labour Party’s parliamentary group for having given a friend a €5,000-a-month contract, the Nationalist Party has said.
The PN said that at the very least, Caruana should be stripped of her ministerial portfolio after parliament’s standards commissioner found that she breached ethics with the deal.
Caruana granted Daniel Bogdanovich a €15,000, three-month consultancy deal to draft a report into sports education in schools. Prime Minister Robert Abela cancelled that deal once it was exposed in the media.
The matter was referred to standards commissioner George Hyzler, who investigated the claim and concluded his report this week. Hyzler's report is not public, but it has referred it to a parliamentary committee – an indication that the commissioner has found indications of an ethical breach.
Parliament’s standards committee must now discuss the report and decide how Caruana should be sanctioned.
In its statement, the PN said that Caruana should publish the report herself, “immediately”.
“The sooner the report is published and action is taken against Caruana, the sooner the education sector can move on,” it said, noting instability in the ministerial portfolio for education.
It later amended that statement, saying that since Caruana had not been provided with a copy of the report herself, then she should do whatever it takes to ensure it is made public.
Independent candidate Arnold Cassola, who first referred the issue to the standards commissioner, said that the incident was "another confirmation of the pig-sty behaviour of another member of parliament.
"It is a tragedy that ethics in Maltese politics have gone to the dogs and, even worse, that this behaviour has been normalised," Cassola said.
Caruana has been Education Minister for just one year, having been assigned the post in a cabinet reshuffle in November 2020 and taking over from Owen Bonnici, who served just nine months in that post.