The Opposition notes what it describes as the Government’s “angry and entirely predictable reply to the expression of disappointment with the limited reach of the legal aid changes” expressed last week by Opposition spokesman for Justice, Selwyn Figueras.

Selwyn Figueras has said that” “when their backs are against the wall, the Government machinery predictably resorts to one of their standard press releases which simply blames the GSD, no matter what.”

The Opposition spokesman continued: “Under a GSD administration both legal aid and legal assistance would have been overhauled by now. The problem is that, instead, a GSLP Liberal Government was elected and they then specifically chose to make one single change to the legal aid regime to favour four defendants in one case to the tune of millions of pounds.

“One GSLP Liberal Government. One fraud trial. Four defendants. £4m and counting...

“The remaining three defendants will now continue to get this gold-plated legal aid, despite the new rules the Government itself published last week! Now they trumpet the fact that they’ve made the changes to cover all exceptionally complex cases but have, rightly, closed down the practice of external counsel being paid off-the-scale fees through the disbursement mechanism. The Minister is fooling no one as to the timing and effect of these changes– they have brought about the changes just as soon as the Court of Appeal ruled that the Marrache brothers should have the gold-plated legal aid which will result in many more thousands of pounds being paid to external counsel as disbursements because the new rules the Minister has published to eradicate the practice, exempts the Marraches and effectively gives them specific and special treatment all over again! The Minister can try and deflect attention from this by mischievously suggesting that a matter of semantics of the English language is somehow more important than the issue itself, but we all know what we’re talking about.

“The facts remain as follows: the law changed in 2012 to gift the Marraches gold-plated legal aid to the tune of millions of taxpayers’ pounds. Now, in 2014, now that the Marraches are safely ‘through the door’ of the old rules, the law has been changed, again, in a way that, again, protects the Marraches’ entitlement to unlimited legal aid and ensures that the Marraches will go down as having been the most expensive publicly-funded defendants in Gibraltarian legal history. No one else will ever come close...” Selwyn Figueras concluded “...and all the Minister can feebly say is that they are going to, at some point, revise the limits. Talk about a Government ‘del pueblo.’”