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Matthew Vella
Labour’s secretary-general Jason Micallef yesterday denied that MEP John Attard Montalto was out of the party’s reach and control, over a public tiff on the employment of international secretary Joe Mifsud with the Party of European Socialists.
Earlier this week, the MEP publicly contradicted a denial by Mifsud in court over his unemployment having been irregular. Mifsud has sued Nationalist Party organ In-Nazzjon for libel over comments made by Attard Montalto on TV that Mifsud’s employment had been “irregular”. Mifsud was taken on as secretary to Labour’s three MEPs while Attard Montalto had been away on a two-month honeymoon cruise.
Mifsud also reported Attard Montalto to the Labour Party’s vigilance and discipline board following his statements on TV. It was the latest in a series of public blunders to have put the unabashed MEP, who also has a history of truancy in the European Parliament, in the eye of the media.
On Friday Attard Montalto issued a public statement after Mifsud denied in court his employment with the PES had been irregular. The MEP declared he had been verbally informed by the PES that Mifsud’s employment was not according to financial regulations, because Mifsud was also an official of the Malta Labour Party.
He reproduced an extract from a letter from PES treasurer Linda McAvan, saying that if Mifsud carried out services for the MEPs, “or any other Labour Party official, this would imply a mixture of Party and Group finances and consequently it does not conform with the financial regulation”.
Secretary-general Jason Micallef yesterday denied Attard Montalto was doing “whatever he feels like”, over what appears to be an embarrassing public tiff between the MEP and a party official.
“Nobody does what they feel like in the party, including John Attard Montalto. He responded to what Mifsud testified in Court, and the matter is being dealt with by the vigilance and discipline board,” Micallef said.
The secretary-general said it had been proper for Mifsud to refer an internal matter of disagreement to the vigilance and discipline board. “We don’t wash our dirty linen in public,” Micallef said.
But asked whether Attard Montalto’s public contradiction of a fellow party official was embarrassing Labour, Micallef denied “categorically”: “John Attard Montalto is quoting a PES letter. This is how things work in a democratic party… in my opinion his statement was a clarification. God forbid that everybody is a ‘yes’ man.”
John Attard Montalto has attracted significant media attention as MEP. As head of Labour’s delegation he was absent for the crucial vote on the Port Services Directive while on a “personal political mission”, as leader Alfred Sant called it, in Central America. Between January and November 2005 Attard Montalto attended just two out of 25 meetings of the Transport and Tourism committee, the committee which discussed the Port Services Directive and which produced the report on which MEPs voted on in Strasbourg.
He has called the committee “a waste of time 80 per cent of the time”.
He was also absent for the vote on the European Constitution, abstained on the Working Time Directive which Labour was against, and has also penned an inflammatory letter to the Libyan ambassador to Malta which his party has dissociated itself from.
Sent ahead of a European Parliament delegation visit to Libya on illegal immigration, Attard Montalto admonished the ambassador not to “continue with the conspiracy theory” about Bulgarian and Palestinian medics sentenced to death for allegedly spreading AIDS among Libyan children “because it is ridiculous”.
mvella@mediatoday.com
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