[attach id=337340 size="medium"]The mock album’s cover.[/attach]
A mock football sticker album featuring 200 “golden soldiers” who were “feeding off people’s taxes”, was launched by the Nationalist Party yesterday.
“The government has thrown out of the window the electoral promise that whoever didn’t agree with the Labour Party can work with the government and that meritocracy will reign,” PN deputy leader Beppe Fenech Adami said outside Parliament.
Flanked by MEP candidates Norman Vella and Ray Bugeja, he said that, in the first 13 months of the legislature, the government had worked for the few, rather than the many.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, he added, was filling the pockets of close friends and relatives instead of taking care of the national interest.
“The Prime Minister introduced the culture that if you work with the Labour media, if you are close friends and a relative of a minister, then you get fed from more than one mouth,” Dr Fenech Adami said.
“This Prime Minister also has the largest Cabinet in history and changed the law so that backbenchers can be given other positions within the public service as another way of making money.”
The album included the “scandal of Silvio Schembri who is eating out of eight mouths” and Michelle Buttigieg, the business partner of the Prime Minister’s wife, who was appointed as the Malta Tourism Authority’s representative in New York and was earning €60,000 yearly, Dr Fenech Adami said.
There were 12 people who used to work for the Labour media and the party and who now had “phenomenal salaries within the public service” and would be earning €3 million between them, he added.
Still, Dr Muscat expected people to thank him for the 2c cut in fuel prices and the 4c increase in stipends, Dr Fenech Adami said.
He noted that it would take 30 years for the 4c increase to add up to €427, the equivalent of what Sai Mizzi, the Energy Minister’s wife, gets in one day as a special envoy for the Asian market.
In a statement, the Labour Party said that while the Opposition leader and the Nationalist Party were distributing albums, the Labour government was giving Maltese and Gozitan families cheaper bills, returning the extra money paid on car registration, providing free childcare and a number of other measures that were leaving families with more money in their pockets.
The album can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/1oRYbmG .