Louis Grech reflects on EU membership he had opposed

The newly-elected deputy leader for parliamentary affairs of the Labour party revealed today he had voted against EU membership, during an interview he gave to PBS chat show TVHEMM.

Louis Grech, who was elected in the wake of the recent resignation of Anglu Farrugia, said that in 2003 he believed that certain aspects of the EU membership package had not been favourable to Malta.

"I felt back then that there were some outstanding issues when it came to the survival of Air Malta as the national airline, with Malta as an EU member," Grech, the former executive chairman of the airline, said.

"I also felt there were aspects that could undermine Malta's financial services industry," the MEP said, citing the financial transactions tax that Malta is vehemently opposing together with the United Kingdom.

"At my age it is ridiculous to state that something is totally wrong or good, and I believe one may say that it was only on certain aspects of EU membership that there were adverse effects for Malta. But on other aspects, for example the legislation of particular directives or even environmental monitoring, these were positive effects of membership. You cannot see these things as simply black or white."

Grech recently became deputy leader of the Labour Party in a one-horse race that took place over the course of the Christmas week last year, when Joseph Muscat asked his deputy leader Anglu Farrugia to tender his resignation in the wake of comments he passed over the alleged political bias of a magistrate.

The resignation took place less than a week after Farrugia's disastrous encounter with the other newly-elected deputy leader of the PN, Simon Busuttil, whom Grech will meet publicly on TVM current affairs programme Dissett, on Saturday.

The day before the Xarabank debate, Farrugia had been pulled out of the live televised prime-time show just minutes before he was due to go on air, after Labour informed Xarabank producers that it would be Nationalist MP Franco Debono who would take Farrugia's place to debate Busuttil.

The party claimed it wanted to give Debono airtime he had been denied on the public broadcasting station.

"If this looked like a strategic mistake to those who perceived it as such," Grech said on TVHEMM, "I can only that I would have still have gone myself to face Simom Busuttil."