The Government has described the most recent in a series of post-Budget advertisements placed by the GSD in the Gibraltar Chronicle as being so “misleading” it must be based on "Voodoo Economics".
The Opposition has said that the Government's “nervous response” to last Friday's GSD advertisement pointing out that the entertainment and travel costs include not just the Chief Minister’s but also all other Ministers and staff at No 6, is a “smokescreen for Mr Picardo’s lavish public expenditure” and the political lifestyle he has become used to since taking over the running of the Government. The GSD says that Mr Picardo “cannot hide from the fact” that public expenditure in these areas is “growing hugely” and was “massively over budget” from the amounts he predicted last year.
The Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo,. left Gibraltar today to attend meetings of Premiers of the UK Overseas Territories in the Cayman Islands. The different leaders have been convened to discuss the agenda of the Joint Ministerial Council to be held in December in London.
The GSD has today claimed that the Government's attempts to obfuscate the issue surrounding the cost of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on one fraud trial, by trying to professionally embarrass a member of the Opposition, is simply not going to work. The party insists that there is ‘no professional embarrassment to speak of however much the Government might try to suggest otherwise’.
The Government says it is astonished by the continued criticism by the GSD on the subject of legal aid and legal assistance adding that this is clearly just an “attempt to be populist despite the facts.”