Labour Party President Ramona Attard – accused yesterday by party colleague Gzira Labour Mayor Conrad Borg Manche’ of betraying Socialist principles and Labour voters – has received another handsomely remunerated government consultancy.
The Shift can report after filing a Freedom of Information request that the former ONE News reporter was given yet another government consultancy last year following Labour’s third success at the polls, as an advisor to her former ONE colleague Minister Julia Farrugia Portelli.
According to her new contract, acquired by The Shift through an FOI request, Attard was to act as Farrugia Portelli’s legal consultant, without any specific hours for a few months, against remuneration of €6,500, excluding VAT. It is not yet known whether the contract was renewed again this year.
This latest contract comes over and above the other government appointments Attard has had since Robert Abela was elected Prime Minister.
Warranted in 2017, Attard was contracted as legal advisor to the Lands Authority, which she is representing in various cases. She has replaced several experienced lawyers, who had their services for the authority terminated or reduced to make way for Attard to increase her workload and, hence, her remuneration.
The Lands Authority has been asked to provide a copy of its own legal consultant’s contract through an FOI request, but it has already failed to reply within the legally stipulated 20-day time frame.
Attard has also defended the government in the freedom of information cases against The Shift.
She is also currently defending the Authority against the Labour Gzira Council, which is trying to protect the locality’s only open green space from being turned into a petrol station. The brief has earned her a scathing rebuke from Gzira Mayor Conrad Borg Manche’, who accused her of acting against the interests of the citizens
Attard has a history of riding the gravy train. Since Labour’s return to power in 2013, she has been put on one government deployment after another.
Starting as chief of staff for then-parliamentary secretary Ian Borg, she moved into the secretariats of former minister Manuel Mallia and later to the Office of the Prime Minister, where she assisted Joseph Muscat.
As soon as she had her law degree, which she earned while working for the government, Attard was appointed as a full-time member of the Environment and Planning Review Tribunal, the Planning Authority’s appeals board, which rules on both minor and major planning permit appeals.
She also joined a small legal firm owned by now Justice Minister Jonathan Attard, Charlon Gouder and Joe Gerada of Chris Cardona and German FKK sauna club, Acapulco, fame.
Soon after Abela was elected, Attard was pushed to become Labour Party president and was also appointed to the University of Malta’s Faculty for Media and Knowledge Science board.
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Simply prostituting themselves for money.
Kemm ghandha talenti din il-mara! Principji m’ghandhiex…
The poor civil servants who sat for the ?untraceable? GAT exam and were successful in their interview are still waiting for their appointment!!
Another Kamala Harris
Shame. It is a travesty of justice that the LP has become an employment agency for friends of friends.
Whilst others, more qualified and experienced have to prove themselves to prospective employers or to the clients in general, when self employed.
No wonder our Country is in such a state of mal administration and digging itself deeper in debt.
It?s probably because she still chants the slogan: ? I believe in Joseph because Joseph believes in me?. Now apparently the whole Party/Government believes in her and cannot do without her. Malta should really feel indebted to her.
That is an apt reminder to a passage from the book ‘The flavour of the Mintoff era – secret negotiations made publid – including confidential annual reviews 1971 – 1987 by eight British High Commissioners serving in Malta’. Written and published by the Maltese author John Manduca,
I like to quote that passage from the book’s chapter 6, Bunkering Facilities for Russia, page 120:
‘On Mintoff’s strenous efforts to obtain as much money as possible form Britain and elsewhere, Edgar Mizzi wrote that Mintoff once told him:
“If I am to prostitute Malta any further, I am only justified in doing so if I can obtain for Malta, through that prostitution, enough money to enable it to lead a better life in the shortest possible time.”
On various occasions, I have confronted some PLers with that above quotation and their response was silence, which means ignoring it.
But the past as quoted from that book has not vanished, it just transformed itself into modern means and because one can factually say that in Mintoff’s times, the MLP was meant to be Malta as much as Malta was meant to be the MLP, by their own understanding and propaganda, swallowed like nothing else by the MLPers, in modern days, it is the same, the PL has the same attitude to Malta like the MLP in the past and the enrichment at the expense of the tax payer is nothing else like the means in the past.
My interpretation of the old MLP slogand ‘Malta first and foremost’ is nothing else than ‘the party is the country and the party comes first and those who are with us get it all well as those who are against us can see where they end up’.
On the grounds of the massive corruption of the Vital’s deal and others, a decent police Commissioner should probe the PL for undeclared millions of Euro. It stands to reason that the PL also gained from the government’s corruption deals.