Jul 21 - GSD: “Chief Minister Changes Goalposts Yet Again In GBC Interview”
The GSD has said that Fabian Picardo “must believe the people of Gibraltar are stupid.” In what the party describes as “an extraordinary interview” on GBC, the GSD says that Mr Picardo has admitted that the Government has no safety report, and never has had a safety report, for either the LNG power station or the proposed LNG bunkering installations. The Opposition says that Mr Picardo “tried to excuse this” by saying that the project was not yet mature and that you could not produce safety reports until the precise details of the project were known. The GSD, however, argues that this explanation “ignores two important facts.”
A statement issued this afternoon continues:
“The first is that the Government has already awarded the tender for the new power station and has incurred a £77 million liability to the taxpayer. How mature does he expect the project to be?
“Secondly, in press release 95/2015 of 18 February 2015, the Government actually said that it had “all safety reports associated with the proposed power station” and that “we are not in a position to be able to publish these reports at this time due to the commercially-sensitive information they contain”. Either the statement he made yesterday to GBC is not true or the press release issued on 18 February was not true.
”The fact that he is blatantly not telling the truth was also illustrated by his comments on the Lloyd’s Report published by the GSD. As Mr Picardo well knows, Spark have now published the report as received by them from Lloyd’s and anyone who compares both versions can see that the report the GSD published was not doctored. When that was put to him, Mr Picardo first said that Lloyd’s are under a confidentiality agreement with Spark and cannot talk about it but then in the next sentence he says Lloyd’s are conducting a comparison between the two versions. These statements are contradictory. How can Lloyd’s have told Mr Picardo that they are conducting a comparison if they have refused to comment because of confidentiality?
“It is not the first time that Mr Picardo he has been exposed not telling the truth, the man appears to have no qualms in this respect. Can anything he says be trusted?”
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