Opposition leader Alfred Sant yesterday broke his media silence for the first time since he resigned the day after the general elections, to reveal that leadership contender George Abela was not saying the truth with his claims that Labour had planned a U-turn on European Union membership back in 1997.
In an exclusive comment to MaltaToday, Sant simply said that “the correct version is that of George Vella”, referring to the latter’s comments last week over Abela’s claims that internal discussions had taken place “to remove the EU freeze”.
Then foreign minister, Vella slammed Abela over his claims that Sant had drawn up a position paper to start discussions with the PN in a bid to lead to convergence on EU membership.
“This is not true. I don’t know of any position paper and never participated in any discussion to change the Labour Party’s policy in relation with the EU.”
Asked directly whether he was involved in any position paper in this regard, Alfred Sant yesterday said he had no further comments other than that “George Vella’s version is the correct one.”
In an interview with sister paper Illum last Sunday, George Vella categorically denied that in 1997 or the year after there was ever a plan to change Labour’s policy on EU membership – a year after it had frozen the membership application soon after its re-election.
“There were no internal discussions, neither at Cabinet level, nor on a leadership, administrative, executive or parliamentary group level, in order to get out Malta’s EU application from the freeze,” Vella said.
Official records of 1 and 2 April 1998 from a joint EU-Malta parliamentary committee in Strasbourg, where former finance minister Lino Spiteri was co-chairman of the committee, also never stated that Labour intended changing its position on EU membership.
On 15 October 2007, during a parliamentary debate on the EU, Alfred Sant also maintained a consistent position on Labour’s view of the EU, saying that Labour had “no negative view of the European Union. I should add that we look at it as something positive and beneficial, but Malta needs to evaluate better as to how close her relations should be with the European Union. It is not true that political and economic calculations today and in the foreseeable future, all automatically indicate full membership. Over the years since 1992 and until this very day, when we stayed close to the ideas, aspirations and needs of the public, the conclusion was that what we are proposing makes a lot more sense in relation to the needs, expectations and aspirations of the Maltese people than what the Nationalists proposed.”