The PN this afternoon launched a mock sticker album featuring 200 “golden soldiers” who it said are feeding off people’s taxes.

Addressing the media outside Parliament, PN Deputy Leader Beppe Fenech Adami flanked by MEP candidates Norman Vella and Ray Bugeja said the government had thrown the electoral promise of meritocracy out of the widow.

In the first 13 months of the legislature, the government had worked for the few, rather  than for the ordinary people, and Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was 'filling the pockets of close friends and relatives' instead of taking care of the national interest, Dr Fenech Adami said.

“The Prime Minister has introduced the culture that if you work with the Labour media, or you are close friends and relatives of a minister, than you get fed from more than one mouth.”

Dr Muscat would be earning €70,000 by the end of the legislature off his personal car that was worth €5,000 which he was renting out to himself, the PN MP said.

“This Prime Miister has also formed 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 - which can be downloaded from the internet - includesthe “scandal of Silvio Schembri who, Dr Fenech Adami said,  was eating out of eight mouths” and Michelle Buttigieg - the business partner of the Prime Minister’s wife – who was appointed by the Malta Tourism Authority as its representative in New York, and was earning €60,000 yearly.

There were also 12 people, who used to work with the Labour media and who now had “phenomenal salaries within the public service and would be earning €3 million between then, Dr Fenech Adami said.

Meanwhile, he added,  Dr Muscat expected the people to thank him for the 2c decrease in fuel prices and the 4c increase in stipends.

It would take 30 years for this 4c increase to add up to €427 – the equivalent of what Sai Mizzi - the wife of the Energy Minister – gets in one day, he added.

PL'S REACTION

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 which were leaving families with more money in their pockets.

While Dr Busuttil and the PN were continuing to push forward a negative policy which was based on hiding the fact they did not have a message to give, the government was, on the other hand, focused on reducing waiting time at the emergency department.

This, the party said, was the difference people had to remember on Saturday.