Documents obtained by The Malta Independent show that the Nationalist government had declared immediately that ministers would have refunded only the increase in the parliamentary honoraria, and not the honoraria in full.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said in Parliament this week that the former Nationalist ministers and parliamentary secretaries had only returned €300,000 of the €1.6 million they had to pay back.

But in his statement on the issue in Parliament on 19 January 2011 (click here), Prime Minister Dr Lawrence Gonzi had declared that "I, the ministers and the parliamentary secretaries who had received the honorarium as established in the new system will be refunding the difference between the honorarium as it was before this change and the new honorarium as approved in May 2008."

In Parliament this week, Dr Muscat insisted that former Nationalist Ministers and parliamentary secretaries should pay back the full honoraria, but the declaration made by Dr Gonzi - to which the Labour Party then in Opposition had not objected - was clear that only the increase was to be paid back.

What confuses the issue more is that on TVM's Dissett soon after winning the March 2013 election (video above), Dr Muscat had said that principal permanent secretary Mario Cutajar had confirmed to him that former PN cabinet ministers had paid back their honoraria dues. This is different from what the PM said in Parliament this week.

Asked to clarify matters by this newsroom today, Dr Muscat replied that the PN had given the impression that they paid the honoraria to the full, but in fact only a small part of what ministers had received had been paid back - €300,000 from the €1.6 million.

He said that at first he believed the PN when they said its ministers had paid the whole amount but then it transpired that they did not and only paid a portion of the total €1.6m they owed back. He said that he has documents in hand which prove this.

But Dr Gonzi's parliamentary declaration makes it clear that the Cabinet was pledging to pay back only the increase in the honorarium, and this is what the ministers and parliamentary secretaries did. 

When contacted, PN secretary general Chris Said said that the honoraria was paid back in the  form of monthly instalments extracted out of the wages of ministers and parliamentary secretaries between April 2011 and March 2013.

The PN general secretary however told One TV this week (video above) that he did not know how much he had paid back. "I did not calculate how much I paid back," he said, avoiding a direct question and going on to speak about parliamentary assistants.