PN co-option: Kevin Cutajar requests way forward

Former PN executive president Mark Anthony Sammut: Delia must move out

Xaghra local councillor Kevin Cutajar
Xaghra local councillor Kevin Cutajar

The Gozo councillor Kevin Cutajar has formally requested the Nationalist Party to outline the next steps for its co-option of a new MP to replace outgoing MP David Stellini.

Cutajar’s bid for the seat, selected by secret ballot in the PN executive committee, was narrowly defeated by 42 votes to 40, after Adrian Delia’s chief political advisor and former MP Jean Pierre Debono won the co-option.

Since then, Debono has relinquished the co-option after former executive committee president Mark Anthony Sammut, cried foul at the voting procedure.

Sammut has now told The Malta Independent that Adrian Delia should not ask for a vote of confidence but immediately resign, taking his team with him.

He said that secretary-general Clyde Puli, the two deputy leaders David Agius and Robert Arrigo, and the party’s media chairman Pierre Portelli and political coordinator Jean Pierre Debono should also go.

Sammut said he did not mean that Delia and Puli are “disposable” – “they could definitely have a role in the party. But neither they, nor I, or any of the people who are often referred to as belonging to some form of plot are the solution for the party to unite and move forward.”

Sammut insisted that there was need for new blood that was capable of uniting and leading the party, and there was no other choice but for the PN to have a new leader going into the next general elections. “First there must be the space and the liberty for others to come forward. Before I took this step, I took note that there is someone ready to fill this space, or else I would not have made that call.”

Sammut resigned last Saturday by way of taking responsibility for the PN’s drubbing at the European and local council elections, after the PN executive voted by 42 votes to 40 to co-opt former MP and Delia’s chief political advisor, Jean Pierre Debono, to the seat vacated by Gozo MP David Stellini.

He later cried foul at the voting procedure that took place, saying that neither David Stellini – the Gozo MP who vacated his parliamentary seat earlier in the week – nor treasurer David Camilleri were entitled to vote for the co-option. He accused Jean Pierre Debono of having had access to the list of eligible voters for the executive committee meeting, implicating him in wrongdoing.

In the aftermath of the vote, Camilleri said he was resigning from his post with immediate effect while pushing back against a number of claims being made about Saturday’s proceedings.  

Similarly, in a letter to PN leader Adrian Delia, which was published by the Nationalist Party on Monday, Debono rejected claims he had attempted to manipulate the vote, saying however that would not be taking his oath as MP.

“It is today clearer than ever before that the same group of people that did not accept the democratic result of your election as leader of the party are today engaged in a ruthless campaign to attack and discredit me personally, because of the fact that I gave up my seat in parliament for you to become leader of the Opposition,” Debono told Delia.

Debono denied claims that he had in any way manipulated the list of eligible voters before Saturday’s vote, insisting that both Kevin Cutajar and himself had full copy of the list and had not objected to it. Turning to the eligibility of PN treasurer David Camilleri, Debono said that he had been listed as eligible for months and “as far as I know there was never any notification from the president of the executive for his vote to be removed”. Sammut, he stressed, had called out each member during the vote, with no objections having been raised.