25 years of excellent reputation broken by the few for their own financial interest – Adrian Delia

“Twenty-five years of Malta’s excellent reputation is being broken by the few for their own financial interests,” Opposition leader Adrian Delia said yesterday in reaction to recent revelations relating to the Dubaibased company 17 Black.

The Times of Malta and Reuters reported last Friday that an intelligence report naming Electrogas power station director and businessman Yorgen Fenech as the owner of the mystery Dubai company 17 Black, which had been named in relation to the Panama companies of Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, had been handed to investigators.

Speaking at an activity at the PN’s Future Leaders programme, where a number of youths posed questions on various subjects to the Opposition leader, Delia said that there was ample evidence for anyone with even the slightest amount of political responsibility to have the decency to shoulder that said responsibility.

He said that it was time to “stand up and be counted” as the world was watching and waiting for action to be taken. He said that every hour that passes where the prime minister remains silent over the new information, is an hour in which more damage is done to the country and its people as a whole.

Delia said that for 25 years the PN had worked to build Malta’s reputation on the international scene, to the point that the country’s reputation preceded it and that it was always welcomed everywhere. Now, Delia said, people were instead questioning how scandals such as these could be allowed to happen.

He noted that it is known that the owners of the Panama companies Tillgate and Hearnville were Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, and questioned why Joseph Muscat, considering that he was ready to resign if he was found to own another company called Egrant, didn’t force Schembri and Mizzi to resign over their proven ownership of the aforementioned companies.

Delia said that if political responsibility was not going to be taken, then the PN was ready to do all it could to defend Malta’s reputation and to defend what was right.

Four separate subjects were also given due consideration during the discussion, with Delia addressing the education, health and waste management sectors, along with the economy.

Regarding education, Delia said that the PN, through initiatives such as the Future Leaders programme, had already started working to improve the future generation, before adding said that education needed to be “about improving both ourselves as people and the social environment around us.”

Delia noted that the PN had supported the Vote 16 initiative not because it would score it political points, which was the reason that the government supported it, but because the PN truly believed in the ability of the country’s youth. He said that the PN would be doing everything, even in opposition, to focus on education.

On waste management, Delia noted that the government had woken up after five years to notice mountains of waste, and that it had acted only after the waste plants caught fire twice and after noticing deadlines looming. They had then acted in a hurried and disorganised manner by introducing a scheme that they knew would not work.

He said that for the PN, waste was a source of energy and said that the party’s philosophy was to look at turning problems into opportunities. He said that the party had voted against the legal notice related to waste management not because it was against the principle of it, but because 80 per cent of the legal notice was ineffectively drawn up. In fact, it was so badly written that a new legal notice had to be tabled soon after, Delia said.

Delia noted that [yesterday] was the commemoration of a century since the end of World War I, a conflict in which Malta was the ‘Nurse of the Mediterranean’, and that even 450 years ago, through the Knights of Malta, had “five-star hospitals.” He said that both in the health sector and the mental health sector, Malta had the ability and the responsibility to be at the forefront.

Finally, he reiterated his thoughts on how the government was running the economy, saying that as opposed to creating new innovative sectors which would create quality jobs, the government had opted to simply inflate the country’s population – something unsustainable in what is already the most densely populated country in Europe.