Matthew Vella
Labour’s star candidate Edward Scicluna has become the target of an anonymous poison-pen letter, which was passed on to Labour delegates and voters during the last week of the election campaign.
The letter, seen by MaltaToday, openly questions Scicluna’s “socialist credentials” in a compilation of newspaper excerpts on his career and his alleged role in the sale of Mid-Med Bank to HSBC.
But Scicluna dismissed the source of the letter as an “inside job”, saying he contacted 25 delegates who said they had not received the letter. “Someone is trying to spin this letter through your newspaper,” he said yesterday.
He also pointed out that the content of the letter contained libellous references to his time as Chairman of the MFSC and his alleged role in pension reform talks.
Be that as it may, the letter itself denounces Scicluna as a person who had “mostly worked against the Labour Party and acted as a spoke in the wheels for Labour, to help the Nationalists.”
It lists examples such as the sale of Mid-Med Bank, where Scicluna, as chairman of the Malta Financial and Services Corporation, is alleged to have “warned journalists that if the sale does not take place, Malta would lose its international standing.”
It quotes from excerpts of The Malta Independent from April 1999 in which the Labour Party had “interpreted Scicluna’s words as an attack on Labour” and that the party felt “threatened” by the economist’s advice.
The anonymous letter also attempts to lay the blame of redundancies at HSBC at Scicluna’s door, and attacks the economist on his position on pensions, claiming it is at loggerheads with Labour’s.
It concludes by asking: “is this Prof. Scicluna’s socialism? Is this his social heart? Is this the type of acquisition workers will make if Scicluna is elected MEP?”
Contacted yesterday, Edward Scicluna said he was unaware of the letter doing the rounds and that nobody from the party administration had informed him of anything unusual.
However, he did say the accusations were not anything new. “I seem to recall that similar accusations were hinted at in a reply to some internet blog… so the tone of the accusation is not entirely new to me,” Scicluna said.
But he added that having emerged as a frontrunner among Labour candidates, according to polls, including MaltaToday’s, he is not surprised at the attack.
He later called MaltaToday to inform the newspaper that several delegates had denied receiving any such letter. He said he had “confirmed” that the letter was not sent to any of the delegates from Malta and Gozo whom he had called.
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