Mizzi refuses to face MPs over Electrogas, PN: ‘dishonest, corrupt and cowardly’

The former Labour energy minister Konrad Mizzi is refusing to attend a parliamentary public accounts committee hearing on the Auditor General’s report into the Electrogas plant.

The MP, implicated in the Panama Papers scandal and sacked from Labour in 2020 following the Montenegro scandal linking an Enemalta investment to a Yorgen Fenech company, was the brains behind the Delimara gas plant project.

“Today I chose not to participate in the meeting of the Public Accounts Committee which is led by the Nationalist Party on the Electrogas project,” Mizzi declared.

“This exercise is nothing more than a partisan attack on the project which shifted energy generation in Malta from polluting Heavy Fuel Oil to cleaner gas and renewable energy, a project that has brought so many benefits to the Maltese and Gozitan people, as well as to the economy of our country.”

The PAC has members from both sides of the House. The PAC is carrying out a follow-up grilling on the NAO report into the Electrogas power station.

“The Electrogas project has already been scrutinized by the Office of the Auditor General, which has completely dispelled the Opposition's allegations,” Mizzi said.

“That is why I regard the call of the Public Accounts Committee as nothing more than a partisan political exercise pushed by the Nationalist Party.”

For the last months, PN MPs in the committee have been summoning witnesses for their views on the NAO report as well as to ask questions on the Electrogas contract.

“It was natural for us to summon the architect of this power station, the monument to Labour’s corruption,” PAC chairman Beppe Fenech Adami said. “Today we know the Delimara plant has been a deliberate attempt to line people’s pockets, and we’re still paying the price for it. He decided to be a coward.”

Fenech Adami said Mizzi, who had once boasted having nothing to fear about his deeds as energy minister, had “chickened out” of attending the PAC hearing to answer for his actions.

“We also ask Robert Abela what he is doing to investigate the suspicions about what happened with the Electrogas power station,” Fenech Adami said. “I am asking the Commissioner of Police to investigate the NAO report and the testimony in the PAC and the Caruana Galizia public inquiry, on Electrogas.”

“Mizzi knows that he would have to spend hours in the PC answering our questions, quetsions that people have long been asking bout him, Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri, and how they concocted the Delimara plant,” MP Karol Aquilina said.

“We would have asked how Labour concocted this gas plant deal before 2013, and how Yorgen Fenech was introduced to Nexia BT and so many others who form part of this deal; what deals Mizzi himself did with Keith Schembri, his overseas bank accounts and financial interets; and what he knows about Egrant...”

Parliamentary rules allow MPs to refuse to attend committees in which they are summoned as witnesses, a practice that is also supported by Erskine May guidelines.

“From my memory, there has never been a similar occasion like this – former ministers like Austin Gatt have testified before the PAC on the Enemalta oil scandal... so what we’re asking for here is a modicum of decency,” Fenech Adami said. “Today Mizzi derelicted his duty, sending the wrong message to the political class, by assuming that we should not answer for our actions.”

Konrad Mizzi was energy minister when Electrogas was awarded a €200 million contract for the Delimara gas plant. But he was revealed by the Panama Papers of having opened a secret offshore company in Panama in 2016, together with former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri.

In 2017, it was revealed that the company was linked to another secret company, 17 Black, owned by Electrogas shareholder Yorgen Fenech, the Tumas magnate. In 2019, after Fenech was arrested and accused of masterminding the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Mizzi was removed from tourism minister.

In 2020, following revelations that Enemalta had acquired a wind farm project from a Yorgen Fenech company, Mizzi was sacked from the Labour parliamentary group.

Mizzi has previously refused to answer any of the questions put to him by the Caruana Galizia public inquiry, having announced he would not testify in the public inquiry, insisting the exercise has been politicised.