It is not true that money from the sale of passports has been used for Malta to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the PN’s finance spokesman, Mario de Marco said.

In the government's first reaction to the passport papers revelations, Economy Minister Silvio Schembri on Thursday defended Malta's passport scheme's role in helping to fund COVID-19 relief measures.

De Marco said in a statement the Economy Minister should stop taking the people for a ride and saying this was the case because it was completely untrue.

He said that compared to 2019, the deficit had increased by €1.3 billion. At the same time, the government reported an increase in debt of €1.26 billion. This showed that the money the government spent on COVID-19 was all coming from debts.

Through the sale of passports, the government made €700 million to obtain a surplus which it wasted in a short time to finance an unprecedented increase in recurrent expenditure, including on greater and more expenditure on a disproportionate cabinet, the PN said.

Such lack of prudence meant that once the country was faced with COVID-19, the government had no other option but to increase debt and explode the country’s deficit so much so that this was the second-highest in the EU, de Marco said.