Dubai row

The row over the MLP visit to Dubai last Summer has reached the media in the UAE. Reporting for GulfNews, Daniel Bardsley quotes an unnamed Maltese journalist saying that the row had created "uncertainty" about the proposed Tecom Investment in the Smart City centre in Malta. From Gulf News:

A trip to Dubai by a group of politicians and businessmen from the Mediterranean island nation of Malta has created a major political row and calls for leading figures to resign...The issue has blown up at a sensitive time, following as it does the announcement earlier this year that Dubai's Tecom Investments would invest more than $300 million (Dh1,102 million) in the development of a media and internet hub in Malta modelled on Dubai's Media City and Internet City..

"The government has seized on this trip as the party taking its friends over to take exclusive contracts in Dubai," a journalist in a leading Maltese newspaper told Gulf News, adding that there had been calls for MLP officials to resign from their positions. "This week there was a meeting at the Labour headquarters with these contractors and people from the ruling Nationalist Party were filming them - it's become a very big issue in Malta.

"The whole issue is whether the MLP funded the trip and they say that they didn't, they say it was self-funded." He added that the row had created "uncertainty" about whether Tecom Investment's planned involvement in the Smart City internet and media centre on the island could be affected, although the four firms involved are not linked to the project.

Smart City fi krizi - Aleks Farrugia