Tony Debono, the husband of former Gozo Minister Giovanna Debono, has been cleared of accusations that he had used public funds to carry out private works.

A Gozitan court ruled that Debono was not guilty of any of the accusations brought against him, with Magistrate Neville Camilleri saying that there wasn’t enough proof to show guilt.

The court found that the case could have been investigated better by police, better investigations which would have led to the accused not being charged in court. 

The court said that even if a witness was granted whistle-blower status, it didn’t mean that all that the witness had said was true.

Debono faced a total of 13 charges including misappropriation of public funds, fraud, abuse of power, falsification of documents, making false declarations, committing crimes he was duty bound to prevent and preventing people from giving evidence.

As the officer-in-charge of the Gozo Ministry's Construction and Maintenance Unit (CMU), he was accused of being involved in a works-for-votes operation, through which the resources of the ministry were allegedly being used to carry out works for the benefit of individual constituents.

He was investigated after contractor Joe Cauchi turned whistle-blower and accused Debono of tasking him to carry out works for constituents and issuing false invoices for them. Cauchi had first approached the ministry about the money he said he was owed by Debono in 2013.

A total of 22 alleged irregular works have been flagged during investigations, and these were carried out between 2004 and the 2013 general election.

The accusations had led to his wife Giovanna Debono – who served as Gozo Minister while the Nationalist Party was in government – to resign from the PN in 2015, when Tony Debono was charged in court.