ADPD – The Green Party has asked the Auditor General to investigate MCAST’s internal financial controls after the school’s financial controller was arraigned with defrauding the school of €2.3 million on Thursday.

Francine Farrugia, who worked as a finance manager at MCAST and who was a Nationalist Party local councillor, was on Thursday charged with misappropriating €2.3 million from the school. A court heard how Farrugia, who had access to the payroll, entered salaries twice across a two year period before police eventually caught on.  Farrugia has since been suspended from her job and has resigned from all of her positions within the PN, including as a local councillor in Siggiewi. She denies the charges.

In a statement on Friday morning, ADPD Deputy Chairperson Carmel Cacopardo said that he had written to Auditor General Charles Deguara after the news of the charges emerged.

"Without prejudice to whatever the result will be regarding the accused, it seems that there is a lack of internal controls on spending within MCAST," Cacopardo told the Auditor General.

He said that this is evidenced from the fact that it was the police which investigated the matter.

Cacopardo therefore requested that Deguara and his team investigate the financial administration setup within MCAST and also to look into what internal controls there are or aren’t so that there is “effective accountability for the use of public funds.”