Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt will not be publicly rebutting claims that allegations he made about a Maltese language e-mail date stamp are factually incorrect.

Few people would understand the technical negation of the claims if it were to be made public, a ministerial spokeswoman said. The minister has instead included the rebuttal in a police report he has filed, alleging a frame-up by three Labour Party candidates.

Dr Gatt has claimed that PL candidates Evarist Bartolo, David Farrugia Sacco and Manuel Mallia have attempted to frame him by falsely implicating him in the ongoing oil corruption scandal.

He has, among other things, questioned the veracity of an e-mail published by Malta Today and subsequently reproduced by The Times between rogue oil trader George Farrugia and a representative of oil company Total.

The e-mail, which dates back to 2004, carries a date stamp in Maltese – something Dr Gatt has said was only possible from 2008 onwards.

A report in The Malta Independent on Sunday the following day said Dr Gatt’s claim could be debunked simply by changing a PC’s system language in its control panel.

The report argued that e-mail date stamps were set at the time of printing, not when they were sent. In other words, an e-mail sent from an English-language PC in 2003 but printed in 2013 from a PC set to Maltese will have a Maltese date stamp. PL media outlets have also argued that Maltese language keyboard drivers were being offered by the Government in 2003, quoting IT developer Ramon Casha as saying Maltese language dates were possible in Windows by the turn of the century.

The Times had first asked Dr Gatt to rebut the claims 10 days ago.

A ministry spokeswoman had at the time said the minister would be responding “in detail” to the debunking claims – a detailed explanation he has now opted to save for the police.

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