Owen Bonnici lambasts PN MEPs, insists criticising government different to attacking the country

Criticism of a government is understandable in politics, however attacking a country and its institutions is unacceptable, Justice Minister Owen Bonnici said on Thursday.

Bonnici was addressing a Labour Party press conference together with MEP candidate Cyrus Engerer, where he discussed last Monday’s grilling by MEPs.  

“I saw with my own eyes, Maltese MEPs attacking the institutions of their own country,” Bonnici said, adding that PN MEPs did not realise how much damage they were doing. 

“When foreigners see [David] Casa criticising our institutions they have more reason to continue trying to break us.”

The Justice Minster praised past PN administrations for introducing the changes in tax system, a decision on which there has always been political consensus, he said.

Bonnici went on to say that the Maltese people trust their country’s institutions more than they trust the PN’s MEPs.

“I want to reassure the Maltese that they have a government which will stand up for them,” Bonnici said. “We have the checks and balances to back-up our arguments.”

Both Bonnici and Engerer condemned the MEPs for their “coordinated attacks on the country”.

“In the PN MEPs efforts to put the government in a bad light, they are forgetting the implications these [attacks] could have on the country’s institutions,” Engerer said, adding that it would ultimately be ordinary workers who would suffer the consequences.  

Engerer referred to the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committee (LIBE), which has been charged with monitoring the rule of law and fight against corruption in Malta and Slovakia. He criticised PN MEP Roberta Metsola for boasting about being part of a committee whose actions, he sadi, could result in Malta losing its voting right within the EU Parliament through the activation of Article 7.

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‘Whole country knows Bonnici was lying’

Responding the press conference, the Casa, Metsola and Zammit Dimech said that nobody at Monday’s hearing had believed what Bonnici said.

“Instead of admitting that at the highest echelons of government there is a problem of corruption and money laundering, he tried to give the impression that here is no problem,” the MEPs said. “Everyone – MEPs, journalists, and the Maltese and Gozitan people – know it is not true.”

The MEPs stressed that foreign “MEPs did not need to be told that Daphne Caruana Galizia had been killed, that Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Keith Schembri were caught with secret Panamanian companies, that the secret company 17 Black belongs to the CEO of the company that is part of the consortium that was chosen to build and operate the new Delimara power station, that Malta’s passport scheme is raising doubts because of a lack of transparency or that magistrate Aaron Bugeja’s Egrant inquiry report was never fully published”.

They said these were facts that were known to all and that can’t be denied. “This is why nobody believed Owen Bonnici.”

The MEPs said that Bonnici had now resorted to attacking them because it was clear that nobody was believing him.