Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1495665
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 26 MARCH 2023 8 INTERVIEW Kurt Sansone ksansone@mediatoday.com.mt Messages from Castille: Abela's The Labour Party was elected for the first time into govern- ment 10 years ago. How do you describe this decade? It was a decade in which the Labour Party in government put into practice its fundamen- tal principle of social justice. It gave everyone the opportunity to achieve their aspirations… But not everything was right in these 10 years and like every other government the Labour Party could have done better in some instances… There is one episode which you cannot describe as 'could have been done better' be- cause it was an ugly episode. I am referring to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Does it anger you that the only, and hopefully never again, jour- nalist to ever be killed in Malta because of her work happened under a Labour administration and linked to it was a web of criminals, people in business and people in power, in this case people close to the Labour government? Undoubtedly, the mur- der was a black mark on our country and we learnt a lot of lessons from it. There was a public inquiry but even before that concluded this country embarked on a series of in- stitutional reforms… how the police commissioner is ap- pointed, how the judiciary and chief justice are appointed, how the president is elected. Once the inquiry report was out, I immediately public- ly apologised to the Caruana Galizia family because I felt that was the first step to bring about reconciliation and start the healing process… Did reconciliation happen? We've done a lot of progress. I met on multiple occasions with Daphne Caruana Gali- zia's relatives and I also put out the message that no nega- tive comments will be tolerat- ed about her relatives, particu- larly her son. But we also know that people have been charged in court with the murder and some have also been sentenced to jail… And what about those odious links between criminals, peo- ple in business and people in power? For a long number of years, we had an organised crime network that proliferated… We had a situation in the country where people feared that organised crime will not be fought seriously. One of my first messages [as prime minister] was to spell out my government's commitment to fight organised crime. Today, we know that the country's biggest delinquents are living at the Corradino Correction Facility… We al- so strengthened the police force… The court annulled the hos- pitals concession in February and it did not have nice words for the private investors and neither did it put in a good light people in power and how they placed the government with its back to the wall. Even so, in parliament you chose to mention the good things Stew- ard Health Care did despite the court ruling. Why did you de- fend Steward? I defended the people's in- terests like I have done con- sistently throughout the past three years. In parliament, I listed the facts as they stood. I pinpointed where Steward failed to adhere to contractual obligations but I could never accept the Opposition's spin that Steward took €400 million in public funds and did nothing with them… The question is whether government took full value for the money it spent on the concession and this is why I wrote to the Auditor General to probe the claim. If this in- vestigation finds any discrep- ancies between what we paid and what they were supposed to deliver, I will be taking legal action to recover any misspent funds. But I also defended the national interest when I resist- ed repeated Steward attempts over the past three years to change the terms of the con- cession… Government also refused Steward's termination on their terms. Instead, gov- ernment terminated the con- On Wednesday morning Prime Minister Robert Abela sat down with Kurt Sansone and talked about the Joseph Muscat legacy, the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder, getting tough on Steward, abortion, government's environmental contradictions and Roberta Metsola. Excerpts.