The Government has this afternoon said that the Leader of the Opposition has issued a press release in which he has “repeated statements that he has made when he has asked questions in Parliament to which he has already received answers.” This, says Number Six, “is done presumably on the premise that if you repeat an incorrect statement often enough, people will end up believing it.”
The Opposition must have a chip on their shoulder given the nature of their reaction to the news that another claim, this time for £27 million, has been brought against this Government for events that occurred in the time of the previous administration in relation to Waterport Terraces, according to the latest statement from the Government.
The Leader of the Opposition has today said that Government Net Debt continues to hit record highs. In addition, the GSD says “it is now clear beyond any argument that the Government is using Credit Finance Company Limited and the Gibraltar Savings Bank (“the GSB”) in order to fund its expenditure and projects.” As a consequence,says the Opposition, the combined debt of this community is around £800 million, which it says it “nearly twice as much as the amount the Government could legally borrow if it did so directly.” The GSD says that these “eye watering figures” are all the more remarkable given that in 2011 Mr Picardo claimed that the GSD was “addicted to debt”, when net debt was £240 million.
Following comments made by Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo insisting that the application to Gibraltar of EU law on civil aviation should be subject to a bilateral agreement between the UK and Spain, the Government has claimed that ‘pain should be made to honour its obligations under the EU Treaties and the agreement that they entered into at Cordoba in 2006’.
The GSD has criticised the Chief Minister’s ‘attempts to make political capital out of legal claims made against the Gibraltar Government’. Commenting on the second commencement of legal proceedings relating to housing developments undergone by the former administration, the party has said that ‘Mr Picardo is, unfortunately, incapable of putting Gibraltar before his own narrow political interests’.
