Nationalist Party MEPs Expenses Story Makes It To Politico
Politico, an international journal covering politics and current affairs, has published a story on the recent accusations made by the Labour Party that Nationalist Party MEPs Therese Comodini Cachia, Roberta Metsola and David Casa have spent part of their parliamentary allowances (around €4,000 a month) on office space rental at the Nationalist Party’s headquarters.
PN has rejected the accusations, claiming that the funds in question had been declared, audited and published. They also released certificates attesting to their claims.
“This allegation is part of an attempt by the office of the Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to shift attention from corruption scandals hounding the government,” a PN spokesperson told Lovin Malta, referring to the allegations made about Muscat’s connection with an offshore Panama company – which have also made international headlines.
“Our accounts are audited annually and certified to be in compliance with EU rules. These are annually made public on our websites,” PN said.
But according to the Politico piece, Nick Aiossa – a policy officer at Transparency International EU – has said that “it is clearly against the rules for MEPs to funnel allowances back to domestic political parties,” and that “as the Parliament negligently provides zero oversight of this allowance, these newest allegations of misuse should be referred to OLAF.”
The Labour Party has in fact challenged PN leader Simon Busuttil to take the case to OLAF, the European anti-fraud office.
Speaking to Lovin Malta, PN insisted that the accusations brought forward were “bizarre” and that the fact that the MEPs office space is rented through Media.Link is not “inconsistent with EU rules”.
“The Labour Party media is arguing that constituency offices should be distributed all over the country. Kindly note that Malta is 28km long which makes this argument extremely bizarre,” PN said.
“Now that there is very little doubt that Joseph Muscat is corrupt and is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation, it would also be interesting to look at his time spent at the European Parliament as an MEP,” the spokesperson added. “It is interesting that his 20k monthly secretarial allowance was spent on just one assistant. That is probably a better story than the extent of geographical location of our offices”.
“Malta is 28km long which makes this argument extremely bizarre”
Nationalist Party spokesperson
A spokeswoman for the European Parliament has said that “Anywhere where there are strong indications that something is amiss, the administration will look into it”.
But it’s pretty clear that the issue is not sitting well with Transparency International EU who has said that “Frankly, the complete lack of transparency and accountability of the [personal allowance] is appalling and it’s a scandal waiting to happen”.