Prime Minister Robert Abela is showing how he wanted to be the element of continuity from his predecessor Joseph Muscat in his failure to shoulder political responsibility over the Electrogas scandal, PN MP Therese Comodini Cachia said on Tuesday.

The Electrogas scandal took a renewed turn on Monday.

In a story on Monday, the Times of Malta revealed that Macbridge International Development is a company which is owned by Tang Zhaomin, the mother-in-law of negotiator Chen Cheng.

Macbridge was named as one of the two companies set up to pay the equivalent of some €5,000 per day into secret offshore Panama companies which were owned by the OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri and then Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi.

The second company was called 17 Black, which was based in Dubai and owned by businessman and Electrogas shareholder  - and the man currently accused of masterminding the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia – Yorgen Fenech.

Cheng Chen was a consultant with a firm called Accenture, and he played a key role in a €320 million deal which saw Chinese state-owned company Shanghai Electric Power buy a third of Enemalta in 2014.

Addressing a press conference, Comodini Cachia said that political responsibility must be shouldered on the basis that such “corrupt contracts” had to be approved by the whole of Cabinet in the first place.

She said that in sending a letter to the police commissioner, Abela had continued on the same lines as his predecessor as he refused to take responsibility himself.

Fellow PN MP Ryan Callus said that the difference between the government and the opposition has never been clearer, and that Abela had to show that he is doing the minimum possible – even if the police commissioner doesn’t need the Prime Minister’s approval to open investigations.

“Why did we have to found out from the media?  This is a clear sign that the institutions are not working”, Callus said.

“The only clear road map which the Labour Party had was a road map to corruption”, he continued, referring to the PL’s now infamous pre-2013 claims of having of a road map for the country.

He said that the government should rescind the contract, get its money back, and then invest it back into clean energy for the country.