Robert Abela fails to turn up to business talk at Chamber of Commerce

Labour leadership candidate Robert Abela failed to show up at business event hosted by the Chamber of Commerce in which he was expected to answer members’ questions together with deputy prime minister Chris Fearne.

Abela informed the Chamber on Thursday evening that he would not be attending, and instead consented to send a recorded message answering the Chambers’ questions on video.

But the Chamber’s ‘Let’s Talk Business’ event overran and the video Abela sent was only received at 11:35am, well after the event finished.

At the event, Chamber President David Xuereb asked Fearne to meet the Chamber again on Wednesday should he be elected Labour leader and PM, so they could present him with 65 proposals on good governance, including one proposing the creation of a minister responsible for good governance. Fearne said he would meet the Chamber.

Fearne showed up at 10am at the Chamber of Commerce in Valletta and he fielded questions from PBS journalist Mario Xuereb.

Fearne said that Malta’s economic momentum was slowing down in the past months since the country was going through a period of uncertainty following developments in the investigation into the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, culminating in Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announcing his resignation.

“A number of European partners don’t trust Malta anymore,” he said, adding that the private sector remains important and is expected to remain vibrant.

On the question of the interconnector, suffering damages at the end of last year with intermittent power-cuts as a result, Fearne said that the energy link between Malta and Sicily would be fixed in the coming two or three months.

Fearne insisted that Malta needed to continue to diversify its economy and added that Malta had to invest in more human resources to get the job done without having to rely on foreign help.

Despite setbacks and obstacles, Fearne said the last seven years in the past under Muscat’s administration have been the best in Maltese history thanks to strong leadership.