Prime minister’s slip reveals more lies on minister’s girlfriend scandal

Prime Minister Robert Abela’s declaration on Monday, intended to divert calls for action against two ministers involved in a scandal, continued to shed light on a series of lies made under oath by the cabinet members involved.

Speaking to journalists quizzing him over his lack of action against Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo and Gozo and Planning Minister Clint Camilleri, Abela said that he was the one who had ordered the termination of the fake contract of employment of Bartolo’s wife, Amanda Muscat, with the Gozo ministry.

The two ministers were found guilty of breaching the ministerial code of ethics. The Standards Commissioner’s report makes no mention of the decision the prime minister claimed to have made.

What the report does point to are several false declarations made under oath by both ministers, their heads of secretariat, as well as Amanda Muscat, who was, at the time, the minister’s girlfriend in an extramarital relationship. The two got married last June, hosting a lavish ceremony that has also caused controversy and is under investigation.

According to Abela, he decided to terminate Muscat’s contract in December 2021, shortly after pushing former minister Justyne Caruana out of his cabinet. The former education minister was caught breaching rules by employing her boyfriend.

Through his admission, Abela let slip that he already knew of the wrongdoing happening on his watch long before the start of the probe. In fact, both ministers told Standards Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi that the fake contracts given to her had obtained the approval of the OPM’s Chief of Staff at the time, Glenn Micallef, now a European Commissioner.

“It was me who decided to terminate Amanda Muscat’s contract, and thank God that I did so,” Abela said in an attempt to justify why he has not yet sacked his ministers.

His declarations, intended to reassure the public of his decisive actions, exposed how Bartolo and Camilleri, together with staff members, on whom they tried to place the blame, gave a different version, under oath, to the Standards Commissioner.

According to the report, which produced correspondence and an interview with Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri, he insisted, together with his lawyer, Joseph Camilleri from Mamo TCV, that Minister Bartolo’s girlfriend had her contract terminated because she had finished her tasks.

While both the lawyer and Minister Camilleri declared under oath that Amanda Muscat was doing her work for the Gozo ministry, which Commissioner Azzopardi found was not true, they also gave a different version of what led to her sudden contract termination. They never mentioned that it was an order from the prime minister.

The report’s findings highlighted how Amanda Muscat never went to work at the Gozo ministry and did not even send any emails to him or his chief of staff, even though she was supposedly Minister Camilleri’s consultant and person of trust.

Abela’s declaration also exposed lies during the same probe by Minister Bartolo and his girlfriend, now wife.

While Minister Bartolo, in his declarations to the Commissioner, suggested that he had nothing to do with her recruitment and blamed his chief of staff, John Grima, Amanda Muscat got confused when asked why her contract with the Gozo ministry was suddenly terminated.

Muscat initially admitted that her one-year contract still had some four months to go, but she later said it had been stopped because her job was done.

When asked to mention some of them, she mentioned the scuttling of a vessel for diving in Gozo. However, she later admitted that the MV Hephaestus vessel was scuttled four months after her contract was terminated.

The prime minister has so far refused to take similar action he took against former minister Justyne Caruana and MP Rosianne Cutajar after similar probes found them guilty of a breach of ethics.

Abela had ordered their resignations at the time. The two ministers involved in this new scandal are known loyalists of Abela. In this case, the prime minister said an apology was enough.

Amanda Muscat was given a salary of almost €70,000 for a consultancy job for which she was not qualified and never did, according to the Standards Commissioner report.