The financial mismanagement of Robert Abela's Government - which has severely missed its own fiscal targets and burdened the country with record levels of debt - has driven Malta into a dead end, the Natiomalist Party said Thursday.
After the Labour Government ignored repeated warnings by the PN and other entities to change course from its reckless overspending of public funds - which is leading to an explosion in government expenditure and debt - the European Commission, following its assessment of the Maltese budget, has now reprimanded Robert Abela and warned that unless he revises this trajectory, it will be compelled to take further action against Malta.
It is the public who will pay for the Government's failures, the PN said.
Under Robert Abela, Malta's debt has surged to unprecedented levels. This Prime Minister has borrowed more than all his predecessors combined since Independence. He inherited a €5 billion debt, which is set to soar to €11.6 billion by the end of this year, and - according to Clyde Caruana's own projections - will exceed €14 billion within three years. This is despite the Government reducing capital investment, leaving the country's infrastructure unable to keep up with the misguided economic policy pursued by Abela and Caruana, the PN said.
The Government's financial mismanagement is laid bare by the fact that, even over the course of a single year, it drastically misses its own forecasts. For 2025, expenditure in the budget was meant to reach €7 billion, but is now projected at €7.5 billion - not an oversight of a few hundred thousand euro, but a shortfall of half a billion. Likewise, the Government deficit, projected at around €850 million, is set to reach €1 billion by year-end. This comes after the Government also significantly missed its deficit forecast for 2024.
This is the same Government that, despite boasting of a supposedly strong economy, brought Malta into the Excessive Deficit Procedure following the FATF grey-listing - a procedure which effectively functions as a "grey list" for countries that fail to comply with their agreed fiscal commitments.
While Labour excels in slogans and self-praise, the reality tells a different story. Last March, Clyde Caruana boasted that Malta's finances were so strong that the country would exit the Excessive Deficit Procedure early. Yet now the Commission is warning that unless he reins in uncontrolled spending, Malta will not only fail to exit early, but the EU will be forced to intervene this coming spring to ensure Malta complies with what is expected of an EU Member State.
In simple terms, because of this Government's mismanagement and waste, Malta risks losing full autonomy over how it manages its own public finances, the PN added.
In recent months, it was not only the PN that raised the alarm. The government's own Fiscal Advisory Council urged Clyde Caruana to correct course, stating that the Government had completely failed to meet its fiscal targets for the previous year.
In this context, the PN appealed for the Labour Government to put an end to the waste and reckless spending that are causing such serious damage, with scandal after scandal draining public finances.
The burden on government expenditure is not the result of necessary energy subsidies, but the result of one scandal after another - scandals that have robbed the Maltese people of millions of euro: from the hospitals scandal to the Electrogas scandal, from thousands spent on consultancies worth tens of thousands of euro a year, to money squandered by the Film Commissioner on parties and extravagance.
The PN urged the Labour Government - in the interest of Malta's integrity, autonomy and reputation - to ensure that these warnings do not fall on deaf ears, and to correct its course without delay.
The statement was signed by Adrian Delia and Jerome Caruana Cilia, spokemen for finance and the economy respectively.