Adrian Delia Gives Former PN Leader Simon Busuttil Official Good Governance Role
Nationalist Party leader Adrian Delia has officially appointed his predecessor Simon Busuttil as the Opposition’s spokesperson for good governance.
Busuttil’s new role comes as Delia shuffles his shadow cabinet, around five months after he was elected PN leader. During last summer’s PN leadership race, Busuttil had urged Delia to drop out in the wake of reports by journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia that he had helped launder money from a Soho prostitution ring over a decade ago. Delia denied the accusations, refused to bow out of the race, and ended up winning the leadership.
Busuttil, who ran the last general election on an anti-corruption platform, has remained vocal in his condemnation of government corruption.
Elsewhere, Delia has named himself the party’s spokesperson for justice. His former leadership rival Chris Said has remained the PN’s spokesperson for Gozo and has had Constitutional reform added to his portfolio. In an interesting move, Claudette Buttigieg, known as one of the PN’s most socially liberal MPs, has been made the party’s spokesperson for civil liberties.
Deputy leaders Robert Arrigo and David Agius are the party’s spokespersons for tourism and energy respectively, while their predecessors Beppe Fenech Adami and Mario de Marco have kept their roles as spokespersons for national security and finance respectively.
Stephen Spiteri has remained health spokesperson, despite revelations he has been handing out medical certificates to patients he hasn’t even seen.
Some new roles have been added; Hermann Schiavone is the PN’s spokesperson for civil society, while Ivan Bartolo is spokesperson for loneliness – as well as poverty and social exclusion.
You can read the full list of Delia’s shadow Cabinet appointees here:
What do you make of this latest appointment?
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