Former parliamentary secretary Rosianne Cutajar has been removed from her position as a member of the Council for Children in the latest move by Prime Minister Robert Abela to distance himself from his errant former  MP.

Cutajar went independent in the wake of the scandal that ensued when her WhatsApp chats with Yorgen Fenech were published by author Mark Camilleri.

The Shift is informed that it was on the direct instructions of the Office of the Prime Minister that Social Policy Minister Michael Falzon removed Cutajar from the children’s council and replaced her with Labour backbencher Katya De Giovanni. De Giovanni had employed her own father when she chaired a government agency.

Cutajar had been serving as Council for Children member for under a year. She had been appointed in July 2022 by Falzon, the same minister who has now removed her.

This is the second role from which Cutajar has been ousted in the last few weeks after her resignation from the Labour Party’s parliamentary group.

Soon after defying Prime Minister Abela by refusing to vacate her parliamentary seat and instead staying on as an independent MP, Abela removed Cutajar from her role as chair of Parliament’s Health Committee.

MPs presiding over a parliamentary committee are paid around €10,000 a year to do so over and above their regular parliamentary honoraria.

Abela asked for Cutajar’s resignation following the publication of compromising and salacious WhatsApp private chats between her and Daphne Caruana Galizia murder mastermind suspect Yorgen Fenech.

In the chats made public by Camilleri, in connection with a libel case Cutajar filed against him, Cutajar described her Labour colleagues as “pigging out” (kulhadd jithanzer) on government contracts, jobs and handouts.

Abela at first resisted calls to sack Cutajar and said that the chats were “nothing new” and that “Cutajar had already paid the highest price” when she resigned from her parliamentary secretary post in the wake of another much earlier scandal that erupted when it was learned she helped broker the sale of an Mdina property for Fenech and had not duly declared the sale for tax purposes.

But Abela appeared to have had a change of heart a few days later and demanded that Cutajar resigns.

The MP, a former Qormi mayor, defied the Prime Minister’s and remained on in the House as an independent MP after resigning from the Labour Party right before a parliamentary group meeting that was to demand her resignation.

MPs become eligible for their privileged uncapped parliamentary pension only if they spend two legislatures in Parliament.