Taxpayers splurging €300 a day on Joseph and Michelle Muscat

Disgraced Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his wife Michelle are costing taxpayers just over €300 a day thanks to the extraordinary severance package his successor Robert Abela has agreed the State is to pay him.

According to new information tabled in Parliament following questions tabled by Opposition MP Graham Bencini, taxpayers last year paid a total of €110,000 to finance the Muscats’ various benefits.

That is over and above the €120,000 golden handshake, revealed by The Shift in 2021, that Muscat arranged for himself on the day he was forced out of office.

Like all of his predecessors, Joseph Muscat was given the use of a car, a full-time driver and a full-time personal assistant. But Muscat’s perks outstrip those of other former Prime Ministers.

Abela also agreed on a free car to be provided to Muscat’s wife Michelle, who never held any kind of public role, as well as a State-funded office that Muscat uses exclusively for his private consultancy business and among benefits.

The taxpayers’ bill for Muscat’s severance package totalled €110,000 last year.

This included €15,000 for the annual lease of his Alfa Romeo, as well as an additional €4,811 for fuel, insurance, licence and maintenance costs.

For Muscat’s wife Michelle, who was not entitled to any severance package, the government last year paid €7,202 as part of the cost of her Land Rover Discovery and an additional €7,363 in fuel and maintenance expenses.

Several thousand euros more in payments included the employment of a full-time driver (€22,359), a full-time personal assistant (€38,404), an office with sea views at Sa Maison (€11,243), the payment of the former Prime Minister’s mobile phone costs (€2,033) and the payment of a phone landline and internet service at Muscat’s Burmarrad home (€729).

Even the cost of Muscat’s personal assistant, former Labour TV reporter Mark Farrugia, is far higher than those of Muscat’s predecessors.

According to established rules, a former Prime Minister’s personal assistant has always been paid at Scale 6 of the government’s salary scales. Farrugia, however, is being paid a Scale 4 salary, the same as a director.

Farrugia had never been employed as a civil servant and was put on the public payroll as soon as Muscat won the 2013 general election.

While Prime Minister Robert Abela has spent the last years digging in his heels to avoid revealing the contents of the unprecedented severance package he approved for Muscat, including refusing The Shift’s freedom of information requests on the matter, he recently began letting out more information about his predecessor.

Abela is currently slipping in public opinion polls and is regarded as being less popular than his predecessor Muscat among Labour voters.