Muscat defends predecessor’s parliamentary actions on bailout

Labour leader Joseph Muscat has refuted suggestions that he was upstaged by his predecessor, who forced a parliamentary delay in the vote on the European bailout fund.

“I said from the start that Labour MPs would all vote in favour of the Bill and that is what happened,” Dr Muscat said yesterday when asked whether former leader Alfred Sant was leading the charges on economic and financial issues.

Dr Sant raised a number of technical issues in Parliament last week that caused a delay in the vote on Malta’s guarantee to the European bailout fund.

The vote was eventually taken on Monday, but many in Europe looked on anxiously as all eurozone member states had to approve the agreement reached in July to bolster the fund and stave off a fresh round of uncertainty.

After Parliament unanimously approved the Bill, the Nationalist Party questioned whether Dr Muscat had handed over the Labour Party’s policymaking on economic affairs to Dr Sant. Dr Muscat defended his predecessor’s actions and said it was PN spin that tried to paint a different picture.

“Alfred Sant acted in his role as an MP and saved the government from an embarrassing situation. He made sure that taxpayers’ money was not being used haphazardly,” he said. Dr Sant simply uncovered the government’s incompetence, he added.

The main bone of contention in Parliament was an agreement that the government failed to lay on the table of the House despite reference being made to it in the Bill.

On this basis, Dr Sant contested the legality of the law enacted last year that catered for Malta’s guarantee to the bailout fund.

“If for others giving a guarantee of €700 million is peanuts, for us it is not and Dr Sant showed that the government was not up to scratch in the most simple of things such as laying on the table of the House the agreement that had been reached,” Dr Muscat said.

Taxpayers now had an assurance that the legal framework by which Malta was supporting the bailout fund was correct, he said. “The government with all its experts came out looking like an amateur in all this.”