Clayton Bartolo’s story of lavish spending, controversy, record tourism numbers

A terse statement by Robert Abela on the Castille steps on Tuesday morning brought the curtain down on Clayton Bartolo’s four-year tenure as tourism minister.

But Bartolo’s stint in cabinet was far from uneventful, spanning pandemics, tourism booms and controversies, one of which eventually brought him crashing down.

We trace the steps back through some of the highlights and lowlights of his time at the ministry’s helm.

1. Guiding Malta’s pandemic-wreaked tourism industry through its darkest days

A one-time Mellieħa deputy mayor, Bartolo rose through Labour ranks, eventually joining cabinet as a parliamentary secretary in Abela’s first cabinet back in early 2020.

By the end of the year, he had made the step up to full-blown minister, inheriting the tourism portfolio from Julia Farrugia in a November 2020 cabinet reshuffle, just as Malta’s beleaguered tourism industry was trying to fumble its way through the wreckage of pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Bartolo, together with the health authorities, performed admirably, gradually bringing tourist numbers back up with relatively few hiccups along the way.

Malta was one of the first countries in Europe to issue digital vaccine certificates the following May, allowing it to finally reopen its doors to tourists, although it narrowly missed out on making it onto a green list of destinations for UK travellers.

By the end of the year, tourism arrivals were picking up pace, with the operators in the sector hoping for a full recovery over the next few years.

2. And, boy, were they right. Tourist arrivals go through the roof

In defending his legacy, Bartolo will be quick to point to the sheer wave of people who have holidayed in Malta over the past few years.

Malta welcomed almost a million tourists in 2021, despite the industry being on its knees for much of the year, before bouncing back to 2.3million arrivals in 2022, only slightly less than pre-COVID numbers.

And things really took off in 2023, with tourist arrivals topping three million for the first time in the country’s history, a year before the tourism authorities planned to hit that particular milestone.

Things haven’t slowed this year, with Malta on track to receive some 3.2m tourists by the end of the year.

3. “Things will be different” – promises to solve Comino deckchair chaos fall flat

The influx of tourists brought a renewed spotlight on the impact of tourists on Malta’s towns and landscapes, particularly in tourist hotspots.

This was most stark in Comino, where a viral Times of Malta video viewed millions of times the world over showed deckchair operators’ illegal takeover of the Blue Lagoon in the summer of 2021.

By the time summer 2022 rolled around, activists had had enough, descending on the bay to manually remove deckchairs and umbrellas themselves, while demanding drastic changes to how the site is managed.

“Things will be different next year,” Bartolo promised at the time, pointing to ongoing talks over a management plan for Comino.

Only, they weren’t.

By the following summer, Bartolo had renewed beach concessions for the site, reneging on a promise to publish a tender for the service, saying that the government was yet to finalise its management plan.

Meanwhile, he refused to publish information about the concessions, arguing that they were commercially sensitive, and rebuffed allegations claiming that he and Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri had a conflict of interest into the concessions.

4. Skills card for foreign hospitality workers

One of the flagship reforms that the Tourism Ministry introduced under Bartolo’s watch, the skills card promised to drastically improve the quality of Malta’s hospitality sector.

Bartolo described the move as a “bold” reform which would ensure that anybody working in the hospitality sector has the necessary skills.

After some teething problems, the card was eventually introduced in March 2024, three months after initially planned.

The jury is still out on the scheme’s success, with initial reports showing that half of the candidates who applied for a skills card failed to make the grade.

5. Film industry glitz, glamour and controversy

While tourism may have been Bartolo’s bread and butter, he was also responsible for the infinitely more glamorous matter of Malta’s film industry.

Throughout his tenure, Bartolo (and film commissioner Johann Grech) were dogged by persistent questions about Malta’s extravagant spending on everything from a controversial cash rebate scheme (€143millio over five years) to a film festival (€3.9m this year) and accompanying promotional short film (another half a million euros).

The pair frequently defended these expenses, arguing that the expenditure is needed to attract film productions to these shores, and pointing to the money that these films leave in Malta’s coffers, much to the scepticism of economists.

But there’s little doubt that several reputable international film productions shot their films in Malta in recent years, most recently Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2, with Bartolo reportedly planning to turn part of the film’s set into a  Popeye village-style tourist attraction.

And while it pointed to a lack of transparency and good governance, Bartolo is likely to have felt vindicated by a recent report from the auditor general, which found that the government’s calculations on the film industry’s return were largely spot-on.

6. Embarrassing gaffes and Manchester United shirts

Bartolo has had to contend with a parade of self-inflicted gaffes throughout his time as minister.

One bizarre instance involved Bartolo’s inexplicable decision to turn up to a match between Birkirkara and Manchester United’s women’s team kitted out in the English side’s signature jacket, drawing ire and ridicule in equal measure.

Bartolo’s well-documented affection for all things Manchester United had previously raised eyebrows when the Tourism Ministry renewed a multi-year sponsorship deal with the club to promote Malta as a tourist destination.

But while Manchester United may get his pulse racing, we learnt that Bartolo is less keen on PN MP Rebekah Borg, after an embarrassing hot mic blunder was caught on a parliament livestream.

Not realising that his microphone was still turned on, Bartolo was heard telling fellow minister Roderick Galdes “oh god, I detest this one with a passion, man”, as Borg rose to speak.

And Bartolo’s stint as a member of the parliamentary accounts committee also met with a series of missteps, not least when Bartolo was caught sending questions to a witness before he testified, prompting calls for his resignation from the committee.

“It seems I made a mistake”, Bartolo sheepishly admitted after he was rebuked by speaker Anġlu Farrugia.

7. From a lavish wedding to consultancy scandal

Bartolo had barely finished rebutting claims that he and his wife Amanda Muscat had abused public funds to stage a lavish Manoel Island wedding when the pair found themselves embroiled in another scandal.

With the couple’s wedding still under the auditor general’s spotlight, a standards commissioner report had found that Bartolo had conspired with Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri to give his then-partner and secretary Muscat a fake €68,000 consultancy job in the Gozo Ministry.

Amid widespread calls for their resignation, Bartolo and Camilleri were admonished by a parliamentary ethics committee, with Muscat grudgingly returning over €16,000.

Hoping to get off with a slap on the wrist, news that Bartolo and Muscat were the subject of an FIAU investigation into alleged kickbacks proved to be the final nail in Bartolo’s coffin.

This post was originally published on here