[WATCH] 'Busuttil must take a decision on Claudio Grech' - Labour party

'Busuttil must take a decision on Claudio Grech' - Labour party • Video by Ray Attard

In a joint press conference this morning, ministers Owen Bonnici and Edward Zammit Lewis urged the Nationalist party to take action, after MaltaToday published emails connecting PN MP Claudio Grech to oil trader George Farrugia.

“Busuttil needs to take a decision and the ball is entirely in his court,” they said referring to collection of e-mails printed by this paper. 

The e-mail exchanges reveal that Grech had met oil trader George Farrugia, who turned State’s evidence in the Enemalta oil scandal, on more than one occasion before 2012. However, Grech, who before 2013 served in transport and infrastructure minister Austin Gatt’s personal secretariat, told the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee scrutinizing the Auditor General’s audit into the procurement of fuel at Enemalta, that he had first met Farrugia in 2012, when he decided to run for the 2013 general election.

“If I met him [Farrugia] before 2012 then it definitely would have been something not worth recalling,” Grech told the PAC, adding that the meeting “was requested by Farrugia himself and that he wanted to talk about the situation with his brothers.”

"The news reports indicate that Grech had given false testimony," Zammit Lewis said, encouraging PN leader Simon Busuttil to act on this new information.

“For all its talk about good governance and honest politics, here there is a clear case of false testimony,” he added.

“Simon Busuttil is now facing a test, and the responsibility of how to react falls entirely on him,” Bonnici said, adding that the PN constantly claimed ‘forgetfulness’ as a defence against implication in various scandals.

Bonnici further underlined that the PN was being given the opportunity to go beyond talk and act against corruption.

“If Busuttil wishes to be credible, he should practise the honest politics he preaches,” Bonnici said, adding that the government had shown its commitment to fighting corruption through the introduction of laws such as the Whistleblower Act and the Party Financing law among others.

Claudio Grech reiterates that he doesn’t recall meeting or exchanging e-mails with Farrugia

Reacting to the Labour party press conference earlier on, Grech issued a press release where he reaffirmed his statement in Parliament.

“Irrespective of the personal destructive approach being adopted by the Labour Party, if I don’t recall an uneventful meeting (out of the thousands of meetings held) and cannot remember an email exchange (out of the over 180,000 sent and received), I cannot and will never say that I do,” he said, adding that doing so would make him a liar.

“That is what I genuinely believe to be the truth to the best of my knowledge and that is the reason why I stated it with such strong conviction,” the statement reads.

Grech added that the Labour Party keeps ignoring his explanation on the matter and it is simply “executing its sharply crafted plan to use the PAC as a tool for entrapment rather than a quest for the truth.”

Grech added that it had sent a further note to the Chairman and Secretary of the PAC, copied to the Speaker of the House, for onward distribution to the PAC Members.

“Once more I reiterated that I absolutely have no recollection of meetings and/or email exchanges with Farrugia before the 2012 encounter which I mentioned in the Committee.”

“Even if a meeting had taken place, the mere fact that it was on an uneventful matter (and certainly in any case not related to the fuel procurement inquiry) clearly makes the encounter a mundane one and not noteworthy of recollection,” he added.

Referring to the e-mails published on this paper, Grech stressed that the exchanges referred to nine years ago during his time as Head of Secretariat.

“Apart from the elapsed time, the intensive work and complex projects handled at the time, my agenda used to contain more than sixty meetings a week and the transmission of huge volume of emails to which I don’t have access.”

“Hard as I tried, I do not recall the said exchanges but I have to underline that it is humanly impossible to remember all exchanges and meetings especially when these were not noteworthy or had no form of outcome or follow-up whatsoever,” he added.