Mario Cutajar categorically denied allegations levelled against him by PN MP Jason Azzopardi in Parliament on Monday.

In a statement issued through the Department of Information, the head of the civil service said that while it is not his role to wade into controversy, this is the third time that Azzopardi has tried to sling mud at him.

Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi claimed on Tuesday that a top-level public officer was forced to hand in his resignation after being arrested on “made-up criminal allegations”. Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday, Azzopardi called for the resignation of Principal Permanent Secretary Mario Cutajar for “abuse of power” in connection with the 2013 incident.

Azzopardi said the officer, employed at the Inland Revenue Department, was asked by Cutajar to step down from his role. When he refused, saying he had not done anything wrong, the permanent secretary threatened him with criminal action.

In the statement, Cutajar said that Azzopardi had first alleged that he had abused his position in order to nominate a youth to a government board because he is related to him, where in actual fact, he said, that person simply shared the same surname as him and that he didn’t even know him – let alone was he related to him.

The second allegation, he said, was that he had abused of his position by apparently employing a family member as a person of trust upon becoming head of the civil service – something which published evidence actually showed that the person had been employed by the previous administration and worked within the same ministry that Azzopardi himself had been in charge in.

Cutajar said that the first two cases which were put before him as head of the civil service in 2013 regarding public officials were on the fixing of marks of public sector exams, which were alleged to have taken place directly by the office of the Prime Minister, and of direction intervention by a person within the previous administration with tax authorities in order to have someone’s taxes forgiven.

In both cases and in any case that followed till today, Cutajar said that he had in no circumstances contacted or interfered either directly or indirectly in even the most remote possible way in how the Police work, be it in terms of the Commissioner or in terms of an investigative official.

“That which Jason Azzopardi alleged against me in Parliament is once again very far from the truth”, he concluded.