Busuttil dodging the press, Muscat reiterates

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has yet again insisted that Opposition leader Simon Busuttil was dodging the press’s scrutiny by reducing his public exposure in the last weeks of the campaign.

In an interview on One Radio, Muscat said that since the allegations that the former Gozo minister Giovanna Debono’s husband Anthony had commissioned private works for constituents on the ministerial payroll, Busuttil had reduced his public exposure.

Muscat said Busuttil had put paid to his claims of being transparency in politics by having not come clean on the extent of his knowledge of the works-for-votes scam when a Gozitan whistleblower who carried out the works complained to the PN leader and secretary-general Chris Said that he had not been paid in full for his work.

“Simon Busuttil spent the morning on Radio 101 speaking on his own for 45 minutes, during which he mentioned not one word about the Gozitan racket. He is hiding,” Muscat said.

The prime minister accused Busuttil of spreading “negativity” when he had personally witnessed “optimism” during his encounters with people.

“Busuttil is trying to hide the mistakes of others and has nothing better to do than wake people at night with automatic phone-calls, because he is scared of facing them. This is the difference between who goes out on the streets to meet people,” Muscat said.

Muscat also said he had no problem in saying that the Malta-Italy interconnector project was conceived by the former government.

But, he added, it was the present government which laid it. "It's like building a house. The PN signed the promise-of-sale agreement and drew up a plan... but we got the permits for it and then got along with building it."

He also said that he had to intervene to have the work move along, altering the route of the interconnector because it would have gone through an oil drilling zone.

Muscat urged all people to vote on Saturday, saying it was better for voters to speak to ministers abou their problems rather than registering a protest vote.