A visibly angry Michelle Muscat, sporting a henna tattoo, today urged the media to be more positive in its reporting of a scheme that is putting inmates to work.

Addressing a press conference at Corradino prison, Mrs Muscat, said the scheme allows inmates to get out of their cells and do something productive. The scheme is a voluntary one and inmates are paid "market prices".

Times of Malta reported earlier today that female inmates at the Corradino prison are owed thousands of euros for curtain and costume design work they have done over the past year in a project endorsed by the Prime Minister's wife, who chairs the Marigold Foundation.

The inmates designed and sewed curtains for a June 2015 exhibition held in parliament, did soft furnishing work for a number of wards at the St Vincent de Paul residence and sewed 400 costumes used during the November 2015 Commonwealth summit.

Mrs Muscat said this afternoon that a payment was made to the inmates in February, but she was unable to quantify the amount paid..

Inmates who have learnt the trade from Mary Grace Pisani, the fashion designer who runs a prison charity that trains female inmates to be seamstresses,  carry out the jobs voluntarily. Michelle Muscat insisted that LFF was not a company; it did not seek out business and did not have a cash flow to disburse ongoing payments. But it could only pay out the money as and when a clients' job is completed and finally paid.

In a press conference led by Michelle Muscat, patron of the Marigold Foundation, the press met one of the CCF inmates who had been on the LFF project for the past two years.

"I'm aware that the payments are taking long to come. But we have already been partly paid in September for a previous job, and since then we started and completed another job for which we are yet to be paid," the inmate confidently told the press during a visit to the CCF's classrooms.

"Mary Grace tells me she does her best to get the clients to pay, and she always does," the inmate told journalists.