Recent scandals exposed by the media suggest Rosianne Cutajar was right when she complained that “everyone is pigging out”, ADPD has said.

“The problem is that she was part of the problem too, seeking to pig out as well," said Ralph Cassar, the Green Party’s secretary general and MEP candidate.

Cassar was speaking at a press conference held outside Transport Malta offices in Lija, alongside party chairperson Sandra Gauci.

The two highlighted the implications of a driving test scandal exposed last weekend, and the way in which Robert Abela’s government had sought to dismiss it.

“People should be able to obtain what is theirs by right and not through favouritism,” Gauci said. Instead of a politics based on rights we have a politics based on patronage.”

Gauci said it was “disgraceful” to see the prime minister try to cover up the scandal rather than acknowledge it as an abuse of political power.

She noted the alarming implications of the driving test scandal, with 1,341 traffic accidents and a record 29 deaths recorded on Malta’s roads in 2022 – 19 more than the previous year.

Cassar (second from left) and Gauci at Saturday's press conference. Photo: ADPD

“One shudders to think that some of those deaths and accidents are the result of institutionalised clientelism with the blessing of the Prime Minister,” she said.

Times of Malta revealed last Sunday that Transport Malta’s director of licencing received requests for several government officials, including minister Ian Borg, to “help” specific driving test candidates.

While Mansueto and two low-level officials have been criminally charged in connection with the racket, the police have not pressed charges against anyone who made those demands of him.

Robert Abela and the Labour government have sought to downplay the scandal by linking the requests to “help” driving test candidates with politicians’ duty to assist citizens.

Abela said earlier in the week that the scandal revealed nothing new and that such requests were “a part of Malta’s political system”.

Employers reacted with horror to that justification, with the Malta Employers Association saying the prime minister had extended “an invitation to anarchy”.

Speaking on Saturday, ADPD’s Gauci and Cassar expressed similar views and noted how the scandal came hot on the heels of a similar scandal involving fraudulent disability benenfit claims allegedly made with the help of a former Labour MP and other party fixers.

“The link between all these stories is clientelism, the rot that has ruined this country. A country where patronage, clientelism and favouritism trump fairness and good governance,” Cassar said as he called for so-called “customer care departments” within ministries to be disbanded.  

"Citizens are not 'clients' - they are citizens who have a right to public services in a legitimate way and not through some patron ‘saint’.”

Cassar argued that the only way to break the current system was to turn away from the Labour and Nationalist parties that had spent decades honing that form of governance.

“Vote differently if you want things to change. Only then will the other parties understand,” he said, adding that the revelations proved Rosianne Cutajar right.

Cutajar was forced to resign as a Labour MP earlier this year when leaked chat conversations she had with criminal suspect and entrepreneur Yorgen Fenech revealed how she was close to Fenech while publicly defending him.

In one of their conversations, Cutajar told Fenech that she was going to sign up as a consultant for the state-run Institute of Tourism Studies because “everyone pigs out”, so she should, too.