Prime Minister’s secretive use of private jets continues to raise red flags

Prime Minister Robert Abela’s official use of a private jet chartered from VistaJet continues to raise red flags about Abela’s spending on luxury travel, especially in the context of his office’s concealment of that expenditure.

On Friday, the Office of the Prime Minister published footage of Abela’s comments following an emergency summit that was convened by the European Council in light of the United States’ increasingly aggressive rhetoric against Greenland.

As shown in this article’s featured photo, VistaJet’s logo is clearly visible on the plane that the Prime Minister used to get there.

The detail is particularly salient in the context of the Office of the Prime Minister’s veil of secrecy around the usage of private jets for official travels, which often include a large entourage.

VistaJet is the private company which had achieved nationwide coverage after allegedly flying out the former owner of Pilatus Bank in the dead of night. This later resulted not to be true by a Court inquiry held by then Magistrate Aaron Bugeja.

Following several FOI requests, The Shift previously revealed that between January 2024 and June 2025, Abela used a private plane for travel on at least 20 occasions.

The Office of the Prime Minister had resisted providing any additional details about the costs incurred by the government for these trips.

Further analysis of direct orders referencing official use of private jet services between 2011 and 2025 shows that the Office of the Prime Minister abruptly stopped publishing information about these direct orders shortly after Abela first came to power in 2020.

While the government is obliged to publish all direct orders and tenders in the Government Gazette, there are no public mentions of private jet services or charter flights booked by the Prime Minister’s Office for the past six years, an apparent breach of public procurement obligations.

The omission is particularly damning, given that the Prime Minister’s office disclosed the use of private jets for official travel on at least 20 occasions between January 2024 and June 2025 (only after several Freedom of Information requests from this newsroom).

The only two mentions of private jet rentals since Abela came to power are the use of a private jet for a flight to Tripoli in May 2020 and the provision of another private jet for a ministerial delegation to Poland and Ukraine in 2024.

The Tripoli flights cost taxpayers €46,000, while the Foreign Affairs ministry’s Poland/Ukraine delegation cost €51,500.

The practice of omitting information about private jet usage from the public record appears to have begun during disgraced former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s tenure.

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While Muscat’s extensive use of private jet flights between 2013 and 2017 appears to be well-documented in the public record, all mentions in the Government Gazette stop after February 2017.

Throughout the period under analysis, 76 documented instances of a private jet being chartered for use by the Prime Minister or a ministerial delegation.

Though information on the cost of most of those trips was omitted, the dozen or so references in the Gazette that do include the cost average of around €34,150.

Public domain records show that Muscat’s sudden switch to VistaJet occurred sometime around 2015, with the private company being awarded almost every single other direct order for the same service since.

VistaJet first made the headlines in 2017, when one of their planes was alledgedly used to fly out former Pilatus Bank owner Ali Sadr Hasheminejad a mere few hours after assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia published a story alleging Egrant Inc belonged to Michelle Muscat. Later, an inquiry on Egrant, headed by Magistrate Aaron Bugeja found that no such flight happaned as the plane was just being re-directed to Baku for normal commercial business not connected to Pilatus Bank or any of its owners.

Between 2016 and 2018, Muscat’s administration paid VistaJet €4.5 million through a bogus agreement signed with the Malta Tourism Authority, raising further questions about the dubious business case for the “communications and marketing” services the private jet company was supposedly giving to the Authority.

VistaJet has also had its fair share of legal issues over the past few years.

In 2024, VistaJet filed a massive €386 million lawsuit against a rival company named AirX over what it had claimed was “an international media smear campaign” against it and VistaJet’s founder, Thomas Flohr.

The majority of shares in VistaJet’s local holding company, Vistajet Group Holding Ltd, are held through a UAE-based company, Vista Global Holding Ltd.