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Michaela Muscat
The University students’ representative who last year was negotiating the changes to the stipends package with the Education Minister Louis Galea is none other than the brother of the same minister’s Communications Coordinator, Claude Sciberras, and economist Jacques Sciberras, engaged by Galea specifically on the stipends reform committee.
While Claude Sciberras smoothened the path for the impending university stipend cuts, his brother Jacques was advising Galea as an economist in the Chalmers committee which led the reform.
Their youngest sibling, Simone, sat on the other side of the fence last year, until the end of the reform negotiation process, representing the interests of university students on KSU and of forthcoming generations who would have to face the reduction in stipends.
The historical presence of KSU members linked to Nationalist Party organs and politicians is only a matter of fact for students, but one that raises questions as to the influence this has on their roles.
That the president of last year’s KSU is also Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s son, Paul, adds to the entire family drama. But Paul Gonzi finds “absolutely nothing wrong” with the close ties between former KSU members and the Nationalist government which carried out stipend reform without incurring the wrath of the student body.
“I don’t see the issue and I don’t think it will destroy KSU’s credibility in any manner,” Gonzi says.
Irked by references to his own and other former KSU members’ family connections, Paul Gonzi defended his role in the KSU executive: “unlike the insinuations you made about me and (Nationalist MP Robert Arrigo’s son) Alan and our role, we were all there in our own personal capacity and our kinship ties did not affect our work in anyway.”
The KSU’s public relations officer Matthew Caruana Galizia is at the heart of the new council’s mission to assess the effect of the stipend reforms but he shrugs off any suggestion that students will be miffed by the family ties.
“If anything, our good connections to the ministry of education do have an impact but in the opposite way. Our good ties enable us to sit around the table with the minister and influence his decision… students will not see any conflict of interest. The ties could be misinterpreted, but I don’t think they will.”
mmuscat@mediatoday.com.mt
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