May 22 - GSD Says Picardo “Simply Not Trustworthy”
The Opposition has said that Mr. Picardo is “plummeting to new depths by misleading the people of Gibraltar” with his latest statement on public finances.
The party stresses that it has notsaid it would stop any works currently being conducted by the Government calling this is “nothing other than an infantile and self-serving distortion” by the Government of what the GSD is saying.
A statement from the Opposition continues:
“Our criticism is that the way Government is spending money shows that we were right to call the last election the Big Lie Election. Nothing that the Government has said in response challenges the veracity of this central assertion, which they and many in Gibraltar know to be true and which calls into question whether Mr. Picardo is trustworthy.
“The undeniable fact is that Mr. Picardo argued that the public finances of Gibraltar were in a ruinous state, when barely two years later he is spending money like there is no tomorrow, including on vanity projects such as a massive upgrade to his offices at No 6 Convent Place at a cost to the taxpayer of £4.5million. This, from the man who criticised Sir Peter Caruana for installing a lift at No 6 Convent Place because he didn’t want to walk up stairs!
“It was never possible to promise to spend over £750 million on capital projects and increase recurrent expenditure by at least 20%, whilst at the same time cutting income available to the Government to pay for it all by freezing rates, rents and electricity, cutting the effective rate of income tax from 24% to 15%, cutting public debt by half and donating all Government surpluses to Community Care. It is because that was an economic impossibility, and Mr. Picardo knew it to be so, that he now has to raid savers money and use the Gibraltar Savings Bank as his unaccountable credit card. By using savers’ money, the Government does not have to borrow directly and public debt and expenditure do not go up. This is dangerous because it circumvents well-established laws designed to ensure that Governments do not borrow in a manner that is unaffordable and distorts the true position of our public finances. That is why our policy is to ensure that any savers’ money used by the Government to fund its expenditure is properly reflected in the accounts of the Government as money borrowed and spent by the Government and we would not borrow more than the law currently allows.
“Finally it is not true to say that the GSD also used savers’ money to fund its projects. The Gibraltar Savings Bank Act contained a section, introduced by the GSD Government, which prevented the use of savers’ money in this way. Mr. Picardo changed the law in March 2012 in order to allow him to dip into the Gibraltar Savings Bank and we opposed the amendments then for the very same reasons we are against the use of the money in this way today.”
