Finance ministry says French lobby claims are 'total fabrication'

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi is in Athens attending a climate change conference.

It was Tonio Fenech's spokesperson who emailed MaltaToday with a government position, at 7:30pm, with a brief denial of the story, a full 12 hours after MaltaToday's story broke.

This newspaper has reaffirmed that diplomats from both the French and Maltese side discussed in September how a watered down reaction to the Roma deportation, could encourage the French to lobby with former minister Michel Barnier to soften his stance on infringement procedures against Malta.

Barnier is commissioner for the internal market and services and a former agriculture minister in the Sarkozy government.

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi took a cautious stand on the expulsion of the Roma, simply saying the Commission was ‘duty-bound’ to investigate but stopped stopped short of affirming a clear stand of disapproval. “France has accepted this and one hopes this matter is cleared in the next weeks, to see whether EU directives were infringed or not. We await the outcome of those investigations.”

His statement had been criticised only by Alternattiva Demokratika, who deplored the PM’s ‘wait and see’, describing it as “a servile attitude and a lack of dignity and self respect on the part of the Maltese government.”

Brussels however is still seeking answers from Malta into the last-minute changes to emission laws that gave BWSC a €200 million contract for the construction of a 144-MW diesel-fired turbine for the Delimara power station.

“The change was not necessary to comply with European legislation as the Maltese authorities seemed to indicate [but] to benefit one of the exceptions to the applicability of the Large Combustion Plant Directive,” Michel Barnier told foreign minister Tonio Borg in a stern letter.