OPM says it has ‘no documents’ on €120,000 golden handshake to Joseph Muscat

The Office of the Prime Minister is insisting that it has ‘no documents’ related to the €120,000 highly suspicious golden handshake to disgraced former prime minister Joseeph Muscat.

A Freedom of Information (FOI) request by The Shift asking for a copy of the letter accompanying the payment of the lucrative golden handshake was twice refused, with the OPM providing only a terse reply stating “the requested document does not exist”.

The OPM’s latest stonewalling and outright refusal to give information about how Muscat received a controversial €120,000 payment in terminal benefits follows a series of questions which The Shift has been raising after revealing the unprecedented payment given to Muscat, forced to resign after only six years in office.

Following last June’s revelations by The Shift that Muscat was paid almost twice as much the terminal benefits as those given to his predecessor, Lawrence Gonzi, despite the former PN Leader serving as prime minister for a longer period than Muscat, Prime Minister Robert Abela has vehemently refused to reply to questions about the subject, avoiding questions from the media as well as parliament.

In his standard reply, Abela has only said that Muscat’s payment was in line with cabinet memos, which under Maltese procedures are secret. Yet The Shift has already revealed that the payment given to Muscat is not in line with other payments given and that his was an ‘extraordinary payment’ that Abela is refusing to explain.

Muscat’s golden handshake remains shrouded in mystery

Following a thorough investigation, The Shift revealed that according to the ‘Terminal and Transitional Benefit Scheme’ introduced by the PN administration in 2008, holders of political office who resign were being paid a month’s salary for every year in office in the form of a terminal benefit.

The Shift established that while Gonzi was paid a total of €73,000 when exiting Castille after almost 10 years at the helm, Muscat was paid a staggering €120,000 from taxpayers’ funds, despite having spent four years less in office.

The Shift has also established that the secret terminal benefits scheme was twice amended by Muscat’s cabinet in 2018 and 2019, the last changes happening just a few weeks before Muscat resignation, likely for his own benefit.

So far, the amendments to the scheme by Muscat and his Cabinet are still a State secret even though benefits are paid from public funds.

When the secret rules were amended, Prime Minister Robert Abela was acting as legal consultant to Muscat and used to be present during Cabinet meetings.

The Shift has also already established that the amendments made by Muscat did not affect the payments made to members of his own Cabinet, as according to information obtained by this news portal terminal benefits paid to former Labour Ministers who resigned following Muscat’s departure were given the same amount of benefits given to former Nationalist Ministers receiving the same benefits in the previous administrations.

In short, it seems Muscat changed the rules to give himself double what others received.

According to calculations made by The Shift, based on publicly available data on the terminal benefits scheme, Muscat should have been entitled to some €60,000 or half the sum he was actually paid by Robert Abela’s government.

The Shift has already filed a formal request to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner to launch an investigation on the lack of information being supplied by the Office of the Prime Minister to Freedom of Information requests regarding Muscat’s golden handshake.

The Shift insisted with the Commissioner that it cannot understand how the OPM is stating that it has no record of communication on a €120,000 payment made to a former prime minister through taxpayers’ funds.

It insisted that once these payments are coming out of public coffers, the public is at least entitled to an explanation. Although some other countries and the EU also have such privileged schemes for political operatives, rules are publicly available for everyone to scrutinise.