The Labour Party will support the nomination of Tonio Borg for EU Commissioner.

It will be doing this because it had never worked against Malta's interest "and it never will", Labour leader Joseph Muscat said this afternoon.

He warned, however, that there were difficulties with Dr Borg’s nomination because of declarations he made in the past which had already reached officials in Brussels.

He did not specify what these declarations were but said that his confirmation should not be taken for granted.

Questioned following a news conference about energy, Dr Muscat said that although he would have liked matters to have been conducted "a bit differently", the nomination was the Prime Minister's prerogative. He did not agree with the Socialist group that the new Commissioner should have been nominated after the elections because the post could not remain vacant till then.

Dr Muscat hoped that the grilling of Dr Borg would not be overshadowed by any doubts over the John Dalli case.

The Labour leader said that without putting pressure, he was making an appeal for the Dalli case to be dealt with as soon as possible.

In the case of then Parliamentary Secretary Chris Said, he said, the courts had acted faster than usual and it would be good if similar tactic was used in Malta in the case of Mr Dalli.

Asked whether he thought Mr Dalli was a victim of GonziPN, Dr Muscat said one had to wait to see how things develop. However, Malta needed to know what was the circumstantial evidence against Mr Dalli, which led to his resignation.

He stressed that it was not the PN or the PL that looked bad but Malta, which would now have an uphill struggle to change the impression some people had developed about the Maltese.