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Kurt Sansone
The issue of port reform is slowly turning into a heated tennis game between General Workers Union (GWU) secretary-general Tony Zarb and Ports Minister Censu Galea. Zarb has told MaltaToday that he cannot understand the minister’s mid-week comments that government had not yet decided whether GWU’s cargo handling monopoly would be replaced by another monopoly.
On Wednesday Galea told sister publication The Malta Financial and Business Times that the GWU had not been correct in stating that government wanted to terminate Cargo Handling Co. Ltd’s monopoly only to replace it with another one after 2006.
Galea said a decision still had to be taken on whether cargo handling operations at the ports would be carried out by a single operator or not.
But according to Zarb it was the minister who had informed the union of Government’s intention of selecting by tender a single terminal operator.
“During the task force meetings held this year, Government’s representatives, the director of ports Charles Schembri, his deputy Charles Abela and the minister’s representative Arnold Mallia, told us that Government wanted to have a single terminal operator. This is all black-on-white in the minutes for the meetings held between February and May,” Zarb reiterated.
The union leader added that it had been Galea who publicly stated there will only be one operator. “In an interview with NET TV he even went as far as saying that the country’s size necessitated a single operator,” Zarb said.
In his comments to the mid-week financial newspaper, Galea explained that there were three different service providers operating in Malta’s ports, namely: the GWU’s Cargo Handling Co., the operators at the grain silo in the Grand Harbour, and those at the Freeport. The Minister said it still had to be decided what type of tender had to be issued and for what services.
Reacting to this argument, Zarb has reminded Gala that none of the two other operators mentioned performed the same job undertaken by Cargo Handling Co. Ltd.
In an interview carried in this newspaper last week, Zarb said Government was simply trying to get back at the GWU because the reform was nothing more than the dismantling of a monopoly to be replaced by another monopoly run by “Mr X”.
kurt@newsworksltd.com
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