Opposition Leader Adrian Delia said on Wednesday evening that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat is working only for himself and his friends for the ten years he planned to be in power. He has no direction or plan for the future after this.
Delia was speaking in Tarxien as part of the PN’s General Council.
He discussed the banking sector, which was again in the headlines this week. Following the cyber attack on BOV last week, he said that this week one of the two main banks in Malta issued an annual report noting less profit. It attributed this, in part, to the country’s poor reputation.
“This is a big concern that needs to be given importance,” Delia said, since all companies and investments depend on the banking system. He accused the government of denying the problem and as a result being nowhere near fixing it.
He mentioned that it is now near to impossible to open a bank account in Malta and also noted the saga of Pilatus Bank and Satabank, adding that now a global bank was making such a statement.
Delia made note of the recent reports about the data mining company Cambridge Analytica meeting with Joseph Muscat and Christian Kalin, CEO of passport-selling firm Henley and Partners. He said that if these meetings are related to the Golden Visa scheme, the consequences are large.
He said that the government is vehemently denying this evidence even though the information is coming from the UK parliament. Muscat spent a large part of the past legislature proudly portraying himself as the salesmen of this scheme but is now trying to go around it and hide behind the notion that it is related to the housing projects.
Muscat is now saying that without the scheme we cannot have the housing projects, just like he said that without foreigners we cannot have pensions, Delia said. “First he creates the problems and then sees who he is going to blame.”
Delia mentioned several reports reporting government’s disservice to Malta and says that instead of accepting these reports the government points its fingers at the PN. Unfortunately, Delia said, Malta cannot be disjointed from the rest of the world and we depend on investments from abroad. With this reputational damage, however, there are going to be consequences.
The PN actually defends Malta abroad, Delia said, saying that not everyone is corrupt. He said we need to do all we can to stop stop this government from placing Malta in a bad light. The government needs to make the necessary changes to the institutions and this needs to be done as soon as possible.
“We have come to a point of no return,” Delia said, adding that this harm will become irreversible. “You spend your life building a reputation but it only takes a day or two to lose it.”