Opposition Leader Bernard Grech has announced that the Nationalist Party will be organising a second protest, which will be held on Monday 2 December, calling for the removal of Minister Clint Camilleri.
“The people deserve a government focused on improving their quality of life, not a government lost in stealing from us and defrauding us,” Grech said in a post on Facebook. “After the pressure from the Maltese people led to Clayton Bartolo’s resignation, it again has to be the people who raise their voices so that (Prime Minister Robert) Abela removes Clint Camilleri and stops defending fraud. Be courageous. Join us this Monday in Valletta. The people will surely prevail,” he said.
The protest is scheduled for Monday at 6pm in front of Parliament.
On Tuesday morning, Bartolo resigned from his post as minister, with the Prime Minister telling journalists that he was also removed from the Labour Parliamentary Group, following fresh allegations surrounding his wife Amanda Muscat. Muscat is alleged to have received a €50,000 kickback from an MTA deal, with Abela saying that these new circumstances have led to Bartolo’s resignation.
Aside from that scandal, Bartolo was involved in another, which also involves Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri. Clayton Bartolo and Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri were found by the Standards Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi to have abused their power when Bartolo’s then-girlfriend, now wife Amanda Muscat was given a job she had no qualifications for, and did not do. The ministers respectively were found to have failed to administer public funds diligently, Azzopardi said in the report. Azzopardi found that Amanda Muscat, now Bartolo’s wife, was first promoted from being Bartolo’s personal assistant to his consultant with an increased salary of almost €62,000 and, later, this was upped to €68,000 when she moved to Camilleri’s ministry in 2021. The report found that Muscat did not do consultancy work. By and large she continued to work as Bartolo’s private secretary, with a consultant’s salary, even when she was employed with Camilleri. On 18 November, the PN had organised the first protest tied to this scandal.
