Investments Minister Austin Gatt rebutted Labour leader Joseph Muscat’s call for his resignation over ‘Mittsgate’ yesterday, claiming Muscat had no faith in the police investigators probing the hacking into government’s central IT system, which compromised 20,000 email usernames and passwords held at the Malta Information Technology and Technology Services.
“Muscat wants someone else to investigate, and he doesn’t say who,” Gatt said, referring to calls by Muscat for an internal inquiry.
Muscat has called for Gatt’s resignation over the hacking incident inside the sensitive MITTS, after the same minister accusing MaltaToday of peddling “a pack of lies” when it reported that police were investigating claims by Opposition MPs that their emails had been hacked.
Speaking in his reply to the Budget speech on Monday, Joseph Muscat declared that Opposition members would no longer be using their gov.mt email addresses.
Gatt accused Muscat of sowing doubt amongst the public over the way MITTS treated the privacy of their data. “That Joseph Muscat sows doubt over the issue of electronic identity cards is politically capricious and shows the lack of interest in giving the Maltese an advanced system of electronic IDs,” Gatt said.
Gatt also hit out at Muscat over his claims that utility bills will treble in cost. He attacked Labour’s “anonymous consultants” who had advised Muscat on the costs incurred by families once the new bills kick in.
“Their incompetence was reflected in his speech,” Gatt, who is the second minister after Tonio Fenech to react to Muscat’s speech, said.
He said Muscat was using incorrect calculations to arrive at a 194% surcharge, based on the old system, to describe the impact of the new tariffs.
“It’s a fantastical figure, which is why Muscat has not published the arithmetic used to arrive at that figure. Working the new tariffs on the old surcharge formula would produce a 125% surcharge, which is substantially less than the surcharge consumers would have to pay in October, 160%, on the real price of oil. Instead government reduced this surcharge,” Gatt said.
“Muscat said government had not said what the price of oil was when government worked out its new tariffs. This was absolutely not true and MCESD members are witness to that, as are the journalists who attended government’s presentation… Muscat was quoting figures off the Internet when he could easily have seen what the government had published weeks ago on its own government website.”
Gatt said Muscat was incorrect about factoring in Enemalta’s inefficiencies in the tariffs, and pointed out that preferable schemes for night energy users already exists. “Even the reverse osmosis plants already operate at night, and his proposal for new meters has already been acted upon. He should have also known that millions of euros in arrears were collected after the amnesty on energy theft in 2006.”
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