War of words between GRTU, FOR.U.M continues

The GRTU said it was “amazing” how the leadership of FOR.U.M, an organisation that included some of the most professional groups in Malta, persisted with its “below-the-belt personal attacks” on the GRTU leadership.

The GRTU described the claims made by Bencini in yesterday's statement as “based on lies and insinuations” and were based on “cheap political propaganda” which, the Union claimed, “would disgust most of the members of the Unions composing FOR.U.M”.

However, in its statement, the GRTU did not address the issue raised by Bencini regarding GRTU Director-General Vince Farrugia’s association with the PN as a candidate for the European Parliament elections on June 6 2009.

The GRTU denied that in the MCESD or somewhere else, it had opened an attack on FOR.U.M. or its President.

However, as reported by MaltaToday last Saturday, its was GRTU Director-General Vince Farrugia in the GRTU, who, in last Friday’s edition of GRTU newsSTRING, under the heading “MCESD is not a forum for separatists,” had claimed that the MCESD “cannot every time there is a offshoot from one organisation represented offer a new seat to the new separatist group”.

The story would then be unending. “Imagine what would happen if tomorrow MHRA, GRTU and then CMTU break up; we would have to create a new seat every time since we took a similar decision when Bencini’s Union broke up from CMTU”, Farrugia had concluded.

The GRTU leaders had expressed their own opinion as they had the right to do. Moreover, each every leader of a constituted body or a Union that are MCESD members had been asked to express their opinion on the matter and the FOR.U.M. President should have had “a sense of tolerance and good manners to accept an opinion which does not agree with his own” and not resorting to “personal attacks and criticism replete with partisan politics”