MP renews call for minister's resignation

Labour MP Anglu Farrugia said yesterday that he was demanding the resignation of Justice Minister Tonio Borg not because he (Dr Farrugia) had received a telephone call from Mario Camilleri, a prisons inmate, but because of the way the law courts had awarded a cleaning contract to a company with links to Mr Camilleri who was even alleged to have tried to bribe two judges.

Dr Farrugia said in Parliament that Dr Borg in an adjournment speech on Monday tried to give the impression that the issue revolved around the telephone calls from the prisons. Yet he had first demanded the minister's resignation a day before receiving the phone call from the prisons.

However, Dr Farrugia said, if the calls were monitored, the minister should produce the recordings of calls made when the company Special Cleaners was being formed and when the call for tenders for the cleaning contract was issued.

The political issue was how the law courts had awarded the cleaning contract to a company with links to people convicted several times, including Mr Camilleri.

This was a scandal which the minister and Parliamentary Secretary Carm Mifsud Bonnici should assume political responsibility for.