SCANDAL OF THE DAY: Government has increased payroll bill by €37m a year while cancer patients beg for charity

The head of state: asking people to donate money to buy chemotherapy drugs for cancer patients while the government of which she formed part spends 37 million euros a year putting its cronies on the state payroll

The government has increased its wages-and-salaries bill by €37 million a year (numbers released by the National Audit Office and Eurostat) while cancer patients receiving treatment at the state cancer hospital have to beg for charity to fund their drugs.

Sources at Boffa Hospital – where cancer patients are treated under the state healthcare system – say that when the hospital’s budget for chemotherapy drugs runs out, they turn to the Community Chest Fund and ask for donations from that charity because they can’t get a bigger budget at the outset or even ‘tide-us-over’ sums from the government.

Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, who has been a Socialist politician since her teens, behaves as though this is entirely normal. In her role as head of state, she is campaigning for more donations to the Community Chest Fund, saying that the charity gives more than €250,000 a month for drugs for cancer patients.

Her (ill-conceived) Cruise for Solidarity, she said yesterday, was to raise money for just this purpose.

Up the road from the Presidential Palace in H’Attard there is a billboard advertising the fact that the Community Chest Fund makes charitable donations of €250,000 a month for chemotherapy.

The head of state is wrong to have turned her role into one of chief fundraiser for the Community Chest Fund, in the first place. She is doubly wrong when the money she is raising is going on chemotherapy that should be provided through the state welfare system, freeing up government funds to be spent on cronies instead.

€250,000 a month is €3 million a year. The government can spend that on chemotherapy drugs itself. It has raised its salaries bill by more than 12 times that amount.