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Karl Schembri
The mayor of the Sannat local council is on the verge of resigning in the wake of what he called “threats and conspiracies” and direct pressures from the Labour Party to approve the performance bonus of the council’s executive secretary against his will. And a group of Labourites are gearing up to field independent candidates in protest against their party’s treatment of the mayor for the local election next March.
Labour Mayor Carmel Camilleri said in a council meeting last month that he was “seriously considering what final decisions to take” as he could no longer work in the council after he lost trust in the council secretary, Arthur Bajada.
Contacted by MaltaToday, Camilleri confirmed that he was under “direct pressure from the Labour Party” to approve over Lm700 as the secretary’s performance bonus, when in his opinion he did not deserve it, and added that he was receiving threats to dissuade him from taking action against the secretary.
“I’ll probably resign next week,” Camilleri said, refusing to name the MLP officials who had put pressure on him. “The secretary is keeping the council under his control and there isn’t much left for me to do in this situation. The Director of Local Government knows about all this but nobody wants to take action.”
Attempts to contact Labour’s official in charge of local councils, Joe Falzon, proved futile.
Sannat Deputy Mayor Massimo Grima and councillors Joe Bajada and Emmanuel Terribile all confirmed the mayor’s declaration about the secretary and about the pressures he had received during last month’s council meeting, but surprisingly, the secretary himself said he had never heard of the mayor’s statement about him when asked about it by MaltaToday.
“Can you send me a copy of this statement as I don’t know anything about it,” Bajada said.
Grima, Bajada and Terribile said the mayor had declared himself during a council meeting held on 14 June, for which Bajada was present and taking down minutes.
In fact, Terribile has thrice asked Bajada in writing to give him the mayor’s statement taken in the minutes of the meeting, but the secretary never answered his request.
“He has that statement and he’s refusing to pass it on to me for his own reasons,” Terribile told MaltaToday.
The mayor told MaltaToday that he was also being pressured by the party to change his declaration.
“The party is forcing me to change my declaration,” Camilleri said. “I’m getting almost no support from the MLP.”
The secretary was already at the centre of controversy last January when he was suspected of passing on misleading information about a councillor’s comments regarding a Gozitan company that was involved in illegal dumping in Sannat, after which the councillor in question, Emmanuel Terribile, received threatening phone calls.
Although Bajada had denied he had made phone calls from the council office on the night of 7 January, he had also refused to file a report to the police in the light of unexplained phone calls found on the council’s itemised Maltacom bill showing that calls from the council’s office were made on that day after office hours, including to Bajada’s own house.
The secretary has also refused to refund Lm195 which he had taken from the council’s coffers as “qualification allowance” despite an urgent motion passed by the council urging him to return the money which he did not qualify for.
The secretary was already warned back in 1998 by then Labour Local Councils Minister Charles Mangion that he would face disciplinary action if he persisted with “behaviour in relation to the mayor” – who was then Roseanne Buttigieg.
Meanwhile a group of Sannat Labourites are spreading the word that they will be fielding independent candidates, mainly from the Sannat football club, who would stand up to the executive secretary and remain free from pressures from the party if elected to the council.
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