Prime Minister Robert Abela should immediately withdraw the €1,700 yearly pay rise he awarded himself and his Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries in the budget, Nationalist Party leader Alex Borg said Thursday.

It is unacceptable that, under the pretext of granting an increase to public sector workers, the Prime Minister gives himself such a raise while giving the public just €4.66 to cope with the rising cost of living, an amount from which tax will still be deducted, he said.

In a message published on social media, the PN leader said that although this increase also applies to him, he was never consulted about it, and he will not be accepting it since he can in no way agree with it under the current circumstances.

Borg explained that he had already made this clear to the Super One journalists yesterday after the Parliamentary Sitting, when they questioned him about this increase that the Government had kept hidden. However, Super One chose not to report what he said.

While calling on Super One to be serious in their work and, instead of serving a false agenda, to serve their viewers by telling them the truth, Borg said that this measure itself together with Labour's lies and the manipulation of its media agents to conceal the measure and his response clearly shows that Labour is disconnected from the people, detached from reality, and constantly tries to shift blame for its own actions onto others.

In reply, the Labour Party the only salary increase that ministers ever gave themselves was under a Nationalist Government when it awarded itself an extra €500 per week.

The change that the Opposition is "deceitfully referring to" is actually the adjustment in the Civil Service pay scales, from which 33,000 workers are benefitting following an agreement signed with the social partners, which came into force at the start of this year.

The Opposition Leader has been benefitting from these same increases ever since he became a Member of Parliament, and if he truly had an issue with them, he would have spoken up about it from the moment he was elected by the people, the PL said.

This is another attack on the civil service, the PL said. "First he accused them of not working, and now he doesn’t even want them to benefit from the increases granted by a Labour Government through the best collective agreement ever reached for workers who serve our country," it said.