Labour loyalist wants fightback over Bartolo scandal with ethics complaints against PN

Neville Gafà, a Joseph Muscat loyalist acting on the fringes of Labour, has filed two ethics complaints against Nationalist MPs in what he claims is a ‘fightback’ for the party.

His complaints come a week after Labour minister Clayton Bartolo was hauled over the coals by the Standards czar for having made his girlfriend, now wife Amanda Muscat, a policy consultant paid €65,000 while carrying out just secretarial duties at his ministry and later the Gozo ministry.

Gafà, a critic of Labour’s current administration for having elbowed out Muscat allies, made no secret of his intention to campaign against the government’s critics.

“Labour cannot stay in a corner simply taking all these punches. The time has come to fight back,” Gafà said, filing complaints to the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life against Nationalist MPs Justin Schembri and Tony Bezzina. “When the time comes, Labour’s going to be firing up ‘machines’ that have long been dormant, on all pistons.”

Grech calls for protest outside House during Bartolo address to MPs

Gafà alleged in his complaint that Justin Schembri, a teacher employed by the Education Department, and architect Tony Bezzina, who is employed with the Public Works Department, have not been reporting for work – ostensibly due to their MPs’ roles – in what he claims is “a breach of ethics”.

Both MPs are still being paid their government salaries while also being entitled to their MP’s honorarium.

“Every MP is bound by the MPs’ code of ethics which can be found in the Standards in Public Life Act’s first schedule,” Gafà said, alleging that Schembri and Bezzina simply report in for their jobs to claim their salaries but did not effectively carry out any work. Gafà added that Bezzina was carrying out private architectural services during this time.

Gafà, a former OPM employee, has placed himself on the warpath against critics of former prime minister Joseph Muscat, recently by placing placards with unflattering news headlines about Daphne Caruana Galizia at the memorial for the slain journalist.

Blogging about his stunt, Gafà taunted supporters of Caruana Galizia on the eve of the seventh anniversary of her assassination, with a placard of one of the journalist’s blogs remarking on the death of Margaret Thatcher and of former Labour prime minister Dom Mintoff, ‘Do by all means speak ill of the dead if they were influential in life.’

“I’ve just been to the Great Siege monument to exercise my right to freedom of expression,” Gafà wrote on his blog. “Now the time has come to see whether they (“ta’ Daphne”) respect others’ freedom of expression.”

Gafà was referencing previous attempts by the Labour administration to clean up the flowers and posters left at the Great Siege monument, which in 2017 was turned into an impromptu memorial for the journalist. The clean-ups, often viewed as deliberate attempts to rile activists, stopped after Robert Abela’s election as Labour prime minister in January 2020.