Budget day slated for 11 October - PM

The 2022 Budget reveal will take place on October 11, Prime Minister Robert Abela announced on Sunday.

During an interview of the Labour-owned ONE radio station, Abela said that government is currently working to draft the budget document that will be unveiled in October.

“This will be a budget that will be a clear sign of the new properity we want to build, where we’ll now start to give lift to important strategies that we have talked about and prepared in the past months.”

The interview largely centred on Malta’s economic growth. Abela said that economic activity has grown by 13.4% more than the GDP registered last year, at least for the first six months of the year.

He added that employment figures remain considerably low, with just less than 1,500 people registered as uneployed.

Throughout the interview he recounted the "mini-budget" announced towards the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. The rescue package saw companies receive €700 million in tax deferrals and €900 million in guarantees.

He said this was money well spent, and celebrated government's choice to avoid austerity policies throughout the pandemic.

“It would have been easy for us to say that we’re going to spend a lot of money on the wage supplement and other schemes during the pandemic, while then slowling down the pace of projects. Instead, we increased the pace of the projects.”

Abela further announced that there are plans to hand out booster shots of the available COVID-19 vaccines starting from around September, first tackling vulnerable groups and elderly homes.

From October, the next vaccine cohort would be elderly groups above 70 years of age.