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A total of 1,039 Nationalist Party members refused to renew their membership this year. The number was disclosed at a ‘secret’ seminar organised at the Lunzjata Carmelite retreat limits of Rabat, MaltaToday has discovered.
A statement issued later in the day by the PN’s Information office failed to mention the fact, but did say that the membership of the PN stood at 33,000 and that 804 new members had enrolled this year. During the meeting, Prime Minister and PN leader Lawrence Gonzi said he would work hard in the near future to reform government entities, referring to the Maritime Authority, the VAT department and the Armed Forces.
He also announced that he was considering removing the local councils’ obligation to organise road cleaning.
The meeting was poorly attended with Ministers Austin Gatt, George Pullicino, Louis Galea and Censu Galea as well as top party officials such as Victor Scerri and Reggie Abela absent from the meeting.
The agenda set for the meeting was meant to cover the functionality of the companies of the party, membership of the party, party projects, government economic performance and long term goals for government.
But before the days’ end only half the agenda was covered.
The day kicked off with a Mass, with Parliamentary Secretary Tony Abela reading the epistle followed by a reading from the Gospel of
St Matthew.
Jean Pierre Farrugia started the meeting off by making an appeal for everyone to forget any differences that exist between the members of the executive.
The discussion on the state of the companies owned by the Party confirmed that the travel agency registered its lowest profit in years, down from Lm177,000 in 2000 to Lm142,000.
Radio 101 was expected to lose Lm 18,000 this year, the first time it experienced a loss in years. The executive was informed that the party had a turnover of Lm4.3 million with Lm1.2 million spent on salaries.
Bad news for the PN came in the form of an announcement that sales of the newspapers In-Nazzjon and Il-Mument were diminishing with the newspapers standing at sales of 6,000 and 13,000 respectively.
The fielding of questions by the executive members was limited because of the Prime Minister’s tight schedule. He left before the end of the executive meeting citing an important meeting.
During the meeting, Dr Lawrence Gonzi also made reference to the University stipends issue stating that he had every intention of settling the matter by the end of the year.
The meeting was supposed to break for an hour-long lunch, but the meal dragged on for two hours, from 1pm until 3pm.
During the meeting, Secretary General Joe Saliba failed to make any mention of the European election analysis report being co-ordinated by Godfrey Grima.
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