Nationalist MP Kristy Debono gets €32,000 a year for a government job at the Malta Gaming Authority but has admitted to rarely going into work and has justified it by saying: “They don’t give me any work to do.”

“They don’t trust me there because I am a member of the Opposition, so they don’t give me any work to do. I don’t even have an office; my desk is in a corridor next to the maids’ lockers,” she told Times of Malta when confronted about her poor attendance.

Over the past four years, Ms Debono had shown up for work about a dozen times and nobody was sure what she did there as head of information analysis, sources told Times of Malta.

MGA chief executive Heathcliff Farrugia said he met Ms Debono last week to ask her to start showing up for work regularly, saying she had even been given the warning in writing.

Debono one of at least seven PN MPs who have government jobs, which means a quarter of the Opposition members are directly employed by the government they are meant to be scrutinising.

The others include PN deputy leader David Agius, whip Robert Cutajar, and MPs Hermann Schiavone, Ivan Bartolo, Toni Bezzina and Ryan Callus.