Nationalist deputy leader for party affairs Robert Arrigo has published excerpts of an email sent by PN MP Therese Comodini Cachia in February in which the latter had asked him to resign along with the rest of the leadership team.
Arrigo took this step following Comodini Cachia’s remarks on Monday when interviewed on current affairs programme Realtà on TVM.
Comodini Cachia, who is the de facto leader of a group of PN MPs who are pushing for party leader Adrian Delia to resign, said that she "never asked for Arrigo to leave" the party.
She however did not exclude that Arrigo might have interpreted a letter she sent "some weeks ago" in that sense.
Writing on Tuesday, Arrigo said that Comodini Cachia was not telling the truth and published excerpts of the email in question.
“Great start for a wannabee. I avoided other attributes that Therese chose to write about me. The hunger of a takeover is so great and now even dangerous,” Arrigo said in a Facebook post.
Arrigo attached part of an email dated February 6 in which Comodini Cachia called on Delia to take “bold decisions” for the PN to reinvent itself.
“This means you and all other members of tmexxija [leadership] need to move sideways, and then each one of us, whatever role we have in the party, need to see how best to act within the party,” the letter read.
“Once again let me be clear, you need to leave the chair of leader of opposition and leader of the party to show that we can take bold decisions to reinvent ourselves and start gaining credibility and respect that is needed to ensure this country can become a full democracy,” she said.
“Your departure, and by ‘your’ I mean the ‘leadership’, cannot be an abdication,” the letter read.
The letter had been sent at the height of a leadership crisis which had been triggered by the PN’s dismal showing in a Malta Today survey. However, Delia had survived the rebellion with no proper confidence vote being taken back then.
Five months later, Delia would lose two confidence votes in his leadership, firstly from the PN's parliamentary group and then by the executive committee.
Responding to Arrigo, Comodini Cachia said he was continuing "to follow Delia’s lead to create division rather than unity" and was "choosing to be selective with the truth".
She said the letter had been published in full last year and that her position was clear and tallied with her comments on TV.
"Since February, 5 months, Adrian Delia had all the time in the world to build bridges and to rebuild our party," she said.
"It is sad to see the PN’s deputy leader focus his energy implementing Delia’s politics of division rather than focus on building unity within the party and on regaining people’s trust."