Mosta mayor 'no comment' on Muscat's warning to councils

Illum newspaper revealed on Sunday that approximately twelve Labour councillors and mayors have been contacted by the Labour Party to step down from contesting in upcoming in upcoming 2012 local council elections in an attempt to end government bureaucracy.

According to Illum, reliable sources said the message was very straightforward: “do not contest in council elections again. If you still want to contest, the Labour Party will not accept your candidacy.”

Muscat recently wrote in L-Orizzont newspaper declaring his plan to “shake up local government to ensure it is on the side of families” and not focus on a bureaucratic approach hindering the proper operation of local councils.”

Muscat had also referred to a minority of councillors who have built a “wall of bureaucracy that has turned them into another government department… Sometimes I have been in a surreal situation in trying to elicit a simple answer from these people as to why a road was not completed or whose responsibility road mending was.”

Illum contacted Mosta mayor Paul Chetcuti Caruana to determine whether he was one of the individuals called upon by PL leaders to not run as candidate.

The mayor was recently involved in an outburst where he had ordered council employees to tear an article written by fellow Labour councillor Josette Agius Decelis on incomplete Mosta roads.

But Chetcuti Caruana refused to comment on Muscat’s decision to restrict certain councillors and Mayors from running for elections saying, “I cannot comment on what others are saying.”

Checuti Caruana is a general practitioner and was responsible for recruiting doctors during the doctors’ general strike in the late 70s. He had also been questioned over the murder of Karin Grech after he received a parcel bomb which did not explode. In 2008, Chetcuti Caruana made headlines when he said he would refuse to allow civil unions to take place at the Mosta local council.