Updated 11.35am, adds PN statement

A special law enforcement agency to fight corruption is needed, civil society group Repubblika insisted on Sunday.

The organisation's call followed the publication of an article in The Sunday Times of Malta which uncovered that a former Labour MP had been at the centre of a huge benefit fraud racket.

The article cites evidence indicating that Silvio Grixti, a popular family doctor, provided false medical documents to help people, often hailing from Labour strongholds like Żabbar, Żejtun and Paola, to receive monthly social benefits for severe disabilities they did not suffer from.

In its statement, Repubblika said the report would have been shocking had one not known that there was corruption from top to bottom in the culture of how Malta operated.

This scandal, it said, carried a number of implications not all of which were immediately clear:

• Government and PL officials systematically used public funds to buy votes.
• A Labour MP who resigned two years ago when he was arrested by the police was at the centre of the case. But both the PL and the police hid this fact for two whole years. One aids corruption when one hides it.
•  For years, hundreds of people were given monthly benefits on the basis of falsified documents and signatures. This showed that control and verification systems to avoid such circumstances had failed and the administration was responsible for this.
• This was an act of political discrimination becaure it showed that Labour Party supporters were preferred with money that was supposed to be there to aid people who had severe disabilities.
• This was another episode of vote manipulation on an enormous scale which increase doubts as to whether elections in Malta are still free and fair.
• Up to a point the police are doing their duty when they arraign people who had received benefits they were not entitled to. But it was fake justice to punish these people and leave those who used political power to buy them with other people’s money on the run.

Repubblika said that as in many other scandals in the past years, this scandal taught many lessons which the government and the Labour Party will probably ignore.

A national effort was needed to mobilise citizen participation in the fight against corruption.

The country needed political parties that seriously fought corruption, primarily by denouncing it, rather than hide it, when they discovered it internally.

If Malta’s social benefits system was not reaching people in poverty, the work of politicians should be to promote new schemes to aid the weak and not to defraud and steal from the people under the guise of “charity”, Repubblika said.

Investigation needed - PN

In another statement, the Nationalist Party said the revelations continued to confirm how the Robert Abela government is surrounded in scandals of continuous theft from the people.

Abela, the PN said, should see that responsibility is shouldered by all those involved.

The Prime Minister could not continue to drag his feet especially in vew of the direct reference to people from his office as well as to Minister Owen Bonnici.

The PN also demanded an immediate investigation for the whole truth to come out.