Omar Cutajar is a graduate in international relations and has been working in EU affairs since 2004, initially in the private sector, with a focus on internal market, industry and SME policy, in the immediate years following Malta’s accession to the European Union. Mr Cutajar subsequently moved to Brussels where he took up work duties as a policy advisor at the Malta Business Bureau (MBB) – the joint EU advisory office of the Malta Chamber of Commerce, the Malta Federation of Industry and the Malta Hotels & Restaurants Association. Mr. Cutajar eventually assumed the management of the Brussels representative office in 2011, before joining the Permanent Representation of Malta to the EU in mid-2015, as the research attaché.

Mr. Cutajar was responsible for the preparations of the Maltese Presidency of the Council in the research policy area, and in this ambit, chaired the Research working party of the Council, with the main task being the negotiation of the Council’s position on PRIMA (Partnership for R&I in the Mediterranean). Mr Cutajar successfully secured the completion of the trilogues with the European Parliament, thus enabling the timely launch of this novel research programming initiative of Euro-Mediterranean relevance, by the beginning of 2018.

Mr Cutajar was in the recent past months Malta’s technical representative in the Council’s preparatory body responsible for the negotiation of the Commission’s proposals on Horizon Europe – the new Framework Programme for R&I and the new Space Programme of the Union for the period 2021 to 2027.