Former MEP hopeful Cyrus Engerer yesterday remained defiant amid calls for his resignation from his government posts after he was convicted of distributing pornographic photos of a former lover on Thursday.

Reacting to the Nationalist Party’s call for him to step down or be sacked, Mr Engerer used the label given to him by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat a day earlier, referring to himself as a Suldat tal-Azzar (Soldier of Steel).

“The truth is that the Nationalist Party feels that Suldati tal-Għazzar don’t have a place in government.

“They have found fault with all appointments that in some way involved people – Suldati tal-Għazzar, Labour militants or activists, call them what you like – who have a position in government.”

When it was put to him that these calls were related to his conviction and not his politics, Mr Engerer insisted on his position: “If you are asking for my comment, this is my comment...” He was speaking in the wake of a press conference addressed by PN deputy leader Beppe Fenech Adami and MP Claudette Buttigieg outside Labour’s headquarters.

Mr Engerer was found guilty of sending pornographic pictures of his former boyfriend to the latter’s employers in a bid to spite him after the pair’s acrimonious split in December 2009.

He had been acquitted by the Magistrate’s Court in 2012 but an appeals court overturned that verdict on Thursday, found him guilty, and sentenced him to a two-year jail term suspended for two years. The development, two weeks before the European Parliament elections, has raised the temperature in an otherwise sluggish campaign, after Mr Engerer on Friday announced he would be dropping out of the election race because he did not want his case “to cast a bad light” on the Prime Minister and the party.

But the Nationalist Party yesterday insisted that this was not enough.

“How is Cyrus Engerer’s position tenable as (EU funds) consultant to the Civil Liberties Ministry and the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the police, now that he is a convicted criminal?” Dr Fenech Adami asked.

The stand drew an equally loaded reaction from the Labour Party, which unearthed an old case concerning Nationalist MP Claudio Grech, who had been found guilty of falsifying an ID card in 1996.

Labour said PN leader Simon Busuttil should be consistent in his criticism and call on his MP to shoulder political responsibility.

But in a counter reaction, Mr Grech accused Labour of attempting to divert attention from the Engerer incident. His case had no consequences on third parties and in fact he had been conditionally discharged, he pointed out.

“Moreover, I humbly respected the court’s decision, learnt from it and moved forward,” he said, arguing that his case in no way justified the way the Prime Minister placed Mr Engerer on a pedestal to turn the truth on its head.

The thrust of the PN’s press conference followed this line, concentrating on a Labour political activity on Friday in which the Prime Minister hailed Mr Engerer as “a soldier of steel” – a term coined by former prime minister Dom Mintoff to describe the party hardcore who stood by Labour in the 1960s despite the Church’s threat of interdiction.

Dr Fenech Adami said the Prime Minister’s performance was a travesty of the truth.

“What happened (on Friday) is scandalous. The Prime Minister basically turned reality upside down and tried to pass off something good for something bad and turned a criminal into a hero,” he said.

He also rejected the idea (promoted by Labour) that Mr Engerer’s case was in any way politically motivated. “This case was initiated by Mr Engerer’s former partner, as was his right, so the idea that this was somehow political doesn’t hold water,” he said.

When this was put to Mr Engerer, he said that police “did nothing” with the case between 2009 and 2011, and that he was only charged shortly after the divorce referendum (in which he campaigned against his party’s position) and him joining Labour.

“I ask, is it a coincidence that when I joined the Labour Party my father was arrested three days later, I got charged 10 days later, the papers were leaked from the courts on the same day, and they eventually tried to take my father’s business in the following months?”

A former PN councillor, Mr Engerer had switched to Labour in 2011 after former Nationalist leader Lawrence Gonzi voted against the introduction of divorce in Parliament in spite of a majority behind the legislation in the referendum held the same year.

Dr Muscat took the same line when asked why he had made Mr Engerer into a hero. He referred to the timing of Mr Engerer’s arraignment and that of his father for cannabis possession, arguing they appeared to be “coincidences” tied to his switching sides.

Mr Engerer said he had made amends with his former boyfriend, saying that both he and his family had actually offered help during the electoral campaign. When asked why he did not feel the need to apologise to the public over the matter, he argued that it was a private matter and he dealt with it privately.

“Secondly, there have been two verdicts, the first court said that I am not guilty and the second said that I am – but, as I said, I don’t really want to comment much on the verdict. The court delivered judgment, now I would like to move on.”

Asked if his response was intended to mean that he did not accept the verdict, Mr Engerer said: “I said already that I feel the verdict is unjust and incorrect on a number of counts but I would not like to comment on this because I don’t feel it is appropriate. All I will say is that someone close to me received an SMS from my former partner in which he said that he could not believe what he was reading when he saw certain parts of the sentence.”

During the press conference, Ms Buttigieg, who is the party’s spokeswoman on civil liberties, also said that Mr Engerer should step down from his position as chairman of the government’s consultative LGBT council since his actions were “anti-gay”.

On this point, Mr Engerer criticised the Nationalist Party over its decision to abstain on the Civil Unions Bill passed a few weeks ago, saying: “The homophobes are those who abstained when it came to voting for equality. That is my comment.”

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