Nationalist Party to send Keith Schembri his €121,000 cheque today - Busuttil

The Nationalist Party will today be sending a cheque for €121,000 to Keith Schembri at his office at Castille, party leader Simon Busuttil announced yesterday.

This amount refers to purchases of newsprint made by the PN up to three years ago, as the party today does not buy newsprint from Mr Schembri.

Last week, Mr Schembri sent the party an official letter (which arrived on Friday) demanding his money and threatening steps if the money is not forthcoming.

“If we knew his British Virgin Islands account number, we would send it to him there, Dr Busuttil said.

But this shows that Mr Schembri has been caught in another lie – he recently said that when he entered politics as the Prime Minister’s personal assistant, he stopped focusing on his company. This official letter shows this claim to be untrue, Dr Busuttil said.

The Nationalist Party is not afraid of Mr Schembri or his threats, Dr Busuttil said, also referring to the editorial in today’s Sunday Times.

Mr Schembri’s pattern can also be seen in the veiled threat he made to Progress Press regarding the money they owe him.

Dr Busuttil was being interviewed on Radio 101.

He asks himself, he began, what would he do if he found himself in the same situation as the Prime Minister, or what would happen in other countries. In any normal, democratic and European country, the minister would be made to resign and maybe the prime minister too. So why has the Prime Minister not done anything about the Konrad Mizzi case after three months of constant uncertainty?

On the contrary, the Prime Minister has been replying to more criticism with heightened aggression. “He called me,” Dr Busuttil said, “maħmuġ (dirty), and this was only because I had quoted facts that result from the Panama Papers. He has blackened the entire political class and has upset people. Before this Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri case, there had been the Café Premier case and the Gaffarena one. The Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri case has now been public knowledge for three months with no conclusion in sight.

“It is true that the preceding PN administration was not perfect, but the time has now come to distance itself from the past, to draw a line between the PN of the past and today’s.

“The Prime Minister is making a fool of himself and bringing Malta to ridicule, such as when he went to the London conference against money laundering and with a straight face said that he too faced the same problem but overcame it. This was like throwing salt on the wound, for the Maltese.

“Or when he told the British to stay in the EU when everyone knows how hard he campaigned for Malta not to join the EU.

“It was Minister Evarist Bartolo who remembered the old adage that ‘there is one law for the gods and another for the rest’. MAM has now come forward to complain that people are being helped to skip queues at the hospital thanks to interference by ministerial teams. An employee at the Income Tax Department has been suspended because his bride-to-be, before marriage, held funds in Panama while the Minister and the chief of staff, who did so after the election, still go unpunished. One law for the gods and another for the humans.

“These are the days when people get their tax bill: they will inevitably be reminded of what Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri have done.

“On the other hand, we have had the Caritas Report saying that a family with two children, spending only for the bare essentials, cannot make it to the end of the month. Comparing today’s bill with that of four years ago, the cost has increased by €1000 but wages have not increased by much.”

Dr Busuttil was also asked about the court decision to award the PN with two more seats in Parliament. He said that it was only when Labour was in power that such issues cropped up. The court sentence has come three years after the election and now government intends to appeal. Had he been Prime Minister he would have given these two seats to the Opposition.

It now seems Malta has a 14th electoral district composed of those given citizenship rights, including the right to vote. The Nationalist Party will continue to fight for its rights and will closely monitor these new voters to establish if they had lived in Malta during this time, he said. A sample of 100 new votes has found that 91 of them were ineligible to vote. The Electoral Commission is so far accepting the PN’s objections.