Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said this evening that he had spoken on Air Malta's strategic importance for Malta in his talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this week. He had also voiced Malta's opposition to any moves by the EU for the imposition of taxes on air travel.
Dr Gonzi said Air Malta was a startegic asset which Malta could not do without.
The challenge for the country in the next few weeks was to take the necessary decisions, however tough, to secure the airline's long-term future as a passenger and cargo carrier.
RAISE FOR MINISTERS, MPs
The Prime Minister insisted, in reply to questions during a NET television programme, that the decision taken to raise the income of ministers and MPs was not taken now but immediately after the general election. The decision, he said, had been made public at the time and the government had actually been criticised for it at the time in the newspapers.
He justified the fact that ministers were now also being given their honorarium as MPs, explaining that while MPs who were not ministers retained their ordinary job and also their honoraria as MPs, MPs who were appointed ministers could not practice their ordinary job, and also lost their honorarium.
That they were not being given their honorarium rectified an injustice. Ministers were entitled to their honorarium as MPs as much as the other MPs, once the other MPs too could receive the salaries for their ordinary jobs.
As he had declared in The Sunday Times in 2008, it was unfair that ministers lost their job and their honorarium once they became ministers. Furthermore, he said, the honorarium they were given was of €360 not €600 per week.
It had also been decided, also in 2008, that the honorarium of MPs would rise to 70% of the civil service pay scale one, instead of 50%.
The decision to give the raise to MPs was taken after talks with the Opposition, and therefore it was not true that the Labour MPs had not known about it. Indeed, some MPs had written in to ask whether their pension was affected. The increases were being given now but backdated to 2008.
Asked if he was prepared to publish the Cabinet decision authorising the raise to ministers and MPs, Dr Gonzi said he could not understand how this was being made out to have been a secret decision when all the ministers had published their statements of income.
It was therefore wrong for anyone to equate this decision to current circumstances and say that the timing was wrong.