Cutajar calls it quits, from Labour but not parliament

MP Rosianne Cutajar has resigned from the Labour Party’s parliamentary group and has gone independent, sparing herself the blushes of being forced to resign by her peers.

Cutajar was to be the subject of this evening’s meeting of the Labour Party’s Executive but she pre-empted the meeting by writing to Prime Minister Robert Abela to tender her resignation from the party.

Cutajar said she would remain an independent MP, just like the disgraced former minister Konrad Mizzi had done in 2020.

But Cutajar chose not to go down Mizzi’s route by exposing herself to a party vote.

Mizzi was voted out by the parliamentary group after refusing to resign when asked to do so by Abela. Cutajar instead resigned by letter.

Cutajar has been facing growing calls to step down since former Labour Party stalwart Mark Camilleri, whom Cutajar has sued for libel, published some 2,200 WhatsApp text messages between her and Yorgen Fenech detailing not only their amorous liaisons but a rot within the government where, according to Cutajar, “everyone is pigging out” and that she might as well do the same.

Those messages exposed how she intended to get herself a freeloading contract from Institute of Tourism Studies CEO Pierre Fenech.

The Shift then revealed how she had begun receiving her third salary from ITS a full three months before she told Yorgen Fenech she had decided to take on the consultancy.

The Shift acquired Cutajar’s contract with ITS through a Freedom of Information request the newsroom had filed.

The Labour Party on Monday evening published Cutajar’s correspondence to Abela, who insinuated last week that she must go by telling the press that “no one is bigger than the party”.

The Shift is informed that Cutajar had little other option than to tender her resignation following a Labour parliamentary group meeting last week in which she had been given an ultimatum to either resign or have the matter brought before the party’s executive scheduled for this evening.

In her resignation letter, Cutajar said she had been elected with 2,200 first-count votes – ironically, around the same number of WhatsApp messages that led to her downfall from the party.

Cutajar also said she had “paid the political price” for her Mdina property wheeling and dealing with Yorgen Fenech when she had been made to step down from her position as a parliamentary secretary.

It was, however, the taxpayer that paid her price: at least €30,000 for leaving office in disgrace, according to a terminal benefits scheme introduced for Cabinet in 2008, which was secretly raised twice by former prime minister Joseph Muscat before he stepped down.

Cutajar was entitled to be paid at least six months of her annual salary and allowances as terminal benefits.