Robert Abela’s government finds it hard to cough up the money for everyday workers but has no problem paying acolytes like Johann Grech €150,000 a year, the PN said on Monday.
Opposition MPs Ivan Castillo and Julie Zahra noted that revelations about the film commissioner’s massive salary was yet another example of Labour’s inner clique “pigging out”.
“The government gives you crumbs while it feasts and gorges off your backs,” the MPs said in a statement. “At a time when the cost of living is playing on people’s minds, this is the Labour Party’s misguided priority.”
The two MPs were commenting on news that Grech, who leads the Malta Film Commission, received an eye-watering €90,000-a-year salary increase in 2023.
Grech earned €60,000 a year in 2020 but is now pocketing more than double that, The Shift News revealed on Sunday.
A Freedom of Information request showed that apart from a €115,000 basic annual salary, Grech also receives a €11,500 ‘disturbance allowance’, €10,000 in paid ‘expenses’, a fully expensed mobile phone and fully expensed car.
News of Grech’s salary made headlines just days after the film commissioner was forced to reveal that he agreed to pay British comedian David Walliams €120,000 to host the 2022 Malta Film Awards.
The commission and Tourism Ministry only revealed that after a court ordered them to, following a two-year legal battle to keep Walliams’ fee under wraps.
Walliams also hosted another festival organised by the Maltese government, the Mediterrane Film Festival in 2023. Grech and Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo have yet to reveal how much he was paid for that gig.
In their statement, PN MPs Castillo and Zahra noted that Grech and the film commission are being probed by the National Audit Office for way in which millions have been spent on rebates to attract foreign film productions. Tourism Minister Bartolo has so far ignored 14 different parliamentary questions requesting details about the money spent on the Malta Film Awards and Mediterrane Film Festival, they noted.
Bartolo and Grech had also sought to keep an impact assessment report into film rebates under wraps. They claimed the report proved that Malta earned €3 for every €1 it spent on film subsidies.
When Times of Malta asked economists to confirm the report’s calculations, they said they were unable to and called the calculations “exaggerated” and “overstretched”.