Clayton Bartolo’s wife, Amanda Muscat, received tens of thousands of euros from a private company which investigators suspect were made as a possible kickback for a contract with the Malta Tourism Authority, the Times of Malta reports.
These payments were flagged by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) and by the police, the newspaper reports.
The Times quotes sources as saying that payments in the region of “€50,000” were made to Muscat by a company linked to a Malta Tourism Authority contractor over a period of around six months.
Clayton Bartolo resigned as Tourism Minister and was also kicked out of the Labour Party parliamentary group as new circumstances have emerged, Prime Minister Robert Abela said Tuesday. At the time he did not say what they were, only saying that it was linked to questions that the Times sent last week. This scandal was then published.
The investigation by the FIAU was about work Bartolo’s wife had done for a company that was linked to Valerio Agnoli, an Italian cyclist, in 2023. The cyclist was hired by the MTA in 2021 to promote cycling tourism on an ad hoc basis, the newspaper reports. The arrangement was formalised in 2023, with Agnoli being placed on an “all-inclusive remuneration of €20,000 per annum,” it quotes a tourism ministry spokesperson as saying.
It read that Amanda Muscat was hired by a company linked to Agnoli half-way through 2023, around 18 months after her ministry consultancy job was ended, and it states that Muscat’s work with the Agnoli-linked company ended in December that year.
It states that investigators sucspect that the payments that had been made to Muscat could be kickbacks for the Malta Tourism Authority contract.
The Times quotes a spokesperson for Bartolo as having confirmed that his wife was “given work on an assignment basis” by a company connected to Agnoli, and that her work consisted of assisting in cycling related initiatives internationally in Italy and Qatar, among other places.
“This assignment had absolutely nothing to do with Malta and bore no relation with the work being done by Agnoli for the MTA.”
