A Nationalist government had secured the maximum financial allocation for Gozo from the EU and the doubts raised by the Prime Minister were only intended to stir a controversy out of nothing, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said yesterday.
Dr Busuttil was commenting in the wake of remarks made on Saturday evening by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat during a Labour Party activity on the sister island as part of the MEP election campaign.
Dr Muscat said the former PN government had failed to convince the EU that Gozo should be considered as a separate region from Malta, casting doubts on whether the government of the time had managed to secure the best possible financial deal. He called on Dr Busuttil to take responsibility for this.
Probed yesterday morning about Dr Muscat’s comments, the PN leader told this newspaper that the bottom line was that the PN government had secured €1,128 million for Malta and Gozo for the seven-year period between 2013 and 2020. Malta had persuaded the EU Commission that it was still an ‘Objective one’ country – meaning that it qualified for the highest level of funding.
Per capita, Gozitan citizens were set to receive a higher allocation than their Maltese counterparts
He said Malta was one of the few member states that had managed to procure a bigger budget than in previous seven-year period in spite of the fact that the overall level of spending by the EU had gone down.
The PN government, he said, had committed itself to channel 10 per cent of the total EU allocation exclusively for Gozo. “This meant that per capita Gozitan citizens were set to receive a higher allocation than their Maltese counterparts,” Dr Busuttil said. The PN leader said the decision of whether Gozo could be classified as a region or not did not rest on the EU but on the Maltese government.
“While I don’t expect the PL to congratulate the PN over this deal, I neither expect the Prime Minister to try to turn the truth on its head,” he said. Dr Busuttil was addressing the media at the launch of the PN’s candidates for the administrative committee elections.
In a statement the PL later accused the PN of not keeping its word, saying both parties had agreed not to organise any activities on the same day of the canonisation of Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII. The PL said that this was testament to the manner in which the PN had not kept its word with the electorate.
The PN refuted these accusations saying that the agreement only applied to political events open for the public.
It also accused the PL of hypocrisy, arguing that the same party that had been harping in favour of the Church-State separation, wanted to suspended its campaign due to a religious event.