(Adds government reaction)

Opposition leader Joseph Muscat said this morning that the government should specify the oil prices on which its original and revised utility tariffs were based.

Speaking at a political conference in Kirkop, the Labour leader said the people would not be taken in by the small revision which the government made to its proposed tariffs last week.

What the people also wanted to know was whether or not the latest proposal was the final one. Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt had declared that consultations on the tariffs were closed, but Parliamentary Secretary Chris Said, after a phone call from Dr Gonzi in China, had said that the tariffs were not written in stone. Would the real prime minister please stand up?

The people also wanted to know when fuel prices would go down, as was happening abroad, once oil prices were going down.

Dr Muscat said that at a time of financial and economic turmoil, the tariffs were the last thing that the economy and Maltese families needed. The government had declared that the international financial crisis had not hit Malta. But instead of enabling Maltese businesses to benefit from the situation, the government had created a crisis of its own in Malta.

Dr Muscat said that in the Budget, the government would be judged by what it did, and what it did not. The government would admit that it had not achieved its targets – which was not a surprise since those targets were unrealistic anyway. But it would be unacceptable for the government to blame its failure on circumstances abroad. The budget was prepared on the basis of the financial situation in the year up to September, and there was no crisis in 11 months of that period. What had happened was that in the run-up to the election, the government exceeded its spending projections by €70 million.

Dr Muscat said the government needed to present a budget which boosted the economy, put money in the people’s pockets and encouraged the nation. This was the time for tax cuts.

The Labour leader referred to the theft of 20,000 usernames and passwords from a MITTS server and said that since it was a policy decision which led to all this information being stored on one server, the IT minister should shoulder his responsibilities, more so when he had refused the resignation of the MITTS board.

The Infrastructure Ministry in a reaction to Dr Muscat’s comments on the power tariffs, said the Labour leader could not make himself out to be an authority on international oil prices and how they should be reflected in local tariffs when he had published a report in which he did not reveal his consultants and did not substantiate his findings.

The Labour leader’s comments earlier today showed that he had not even read the government documentation, the ministry said. The first proposed tariffs were based on the oil price in September and had therefore already factored in the drop in oil prices from earlier this year.

Following consultation in the MCESD, the government reduced its revenue projections by €50 million on the basis of an expectation that oil prices would continue to drop.

The government had also said that electricity tariffs would henceforth be revised every six months, except when fluctuations exceeded 15%, in which case revision would be immediate.