The Momentum Party has sent a request to the Standards Commissioner to launch an investigation into a potential breach of ethics by the government's Cabinet, Momentum Chairperson Arnold Cassola said in a statement on Friday.
Cassola wrote that the members of Cabinet had to file their declarations of assets for 2023 by March 2024 and table them in Parliament. He continued that this did not happen, and is now "overdue" by almost a year.
"On behalf of the Momentum committee, I am requesting that Prime Minister Robert Abela and every minister and every parliamentary secretary in the Cabinet be investigated for a breach of ethics, as they have failed to table their 2023 asset declarations in Parliament, as required by the ministerial code of ethics," Cassola stated.
He remarked that their failure in presenting their declarations shows "an arrogant contempt towards transparency and citizens".
On Tuesday, Nationalist Party MP Karol Aquilina called for a parliamentary ruling on the matter of the declarations not having been tabled, and Speaker Anglu Farrugia in turn said that he could not order the Prime Minister to table them.
Furthermore, Farrugia said that the law did not oblige the government to adhere to the practice of tabling the Cabinet's declarations of assets. He also stated that other Prime Ministers before Abela tended to submit the declarations annually, but that there were three occasions throughout the last thirty years where the declarations were not tabled. Those three occasions occurred in 2001, 2005, and 2007.