A controversial claim that Malta borrowed €1billion in the month before the general election was announced, made by PN leader Alex Borg, turned out not to be correct, through no fault of his own.
Borg made the claim at a party rally just days ahead of the vote, on May 27, pointing to figures published earlier in the week by the European Central Bank (ECB), showing that Malta’s public debt had continued to rise.
The figures cited by Borg listed Malta’s debt at €11.9 billion at the end of April 2026, almost €1 billion more than the figure registered at the end of March 2026.
He argued that the government had tried to keep voters in the dark about the state of public finances, after the National Statistics Office (NSO) had postponed the planned release of financial and unemployment data because it fell on the eve of the election, on the so-called day of silence during which Maltese law prohibits the publication of any material that can sway the vote.
But Borg said the ECB had nevertheless published figures showing that government borrowing had risen to almost €12 billion by April 2026.
“Between March and April 2026, in one month, the government borrowed €1 billion,” Borg told supporters, saying this had happened just days before the election was called.
The claim prompted an angry reply from finance minster Clyde Caruana, who described Borg as “financially illiterate” the following day.
““Malta did not spend a billion euros in debt in a single month. In fact, the country does not even spend that amount in an entire year,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party described Borg’s claim as “a blatant lie” that shows how he “doesn’t even understand statistics on national debt”.
However, the affair took a surprise turn on the afternoon of May 28 when the European Central Bank unexpectedly revised Malta’s debt figures downwards by €600 million, saying it had mistakenly “overstated” Malta’s debt in its original publication.
Rather than the €11.9 billion it had first published, and which Borg cited in his claim, Malta’s debt was actually just over €11.3 billion, the new ECB figures showed.
“The provisional figures for Malta’s total debt securities issued by the general government as at end-April 2026 are overstated,” the ECB said. “The actual figures should amount to €11.353 billion. These figures will be revised in the next publication”.
Likewise, the NSO’s financial data, eventually published after the election was held, showed that, although debt had risen, this was at a lower rate than that inadvertently claimed by Borg.
Following the data’s publication, PN said the figures nonetheless show that the government had amassed an “exorbitant” debt of €558 million in April.
“The same figures, which should have been published on Friday, confirm what the PN revealed before the election about the exorbitant public debt incurred by Labour in the final month before the election,” the party said in a statement.
