News | Sunday, 08 March 2009

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Ministry denies involvement in engineer’s dismissal

The Ministry for Resources and Rural Affairs has denied having been involved in a decision to terminate the employment of the former gay candidate Patrick Attard from the Malta Resources Authority.
Alternattiva Demokratika called the sacking of its former candidate “an attack on the right of freedom of expression”, after Attard posted a comment on the timesofmalta.com website.
The engineer filed a judicial protest denying he breached corporate secrecy.
Attard commented on the news website under an item reporting the Gozo Bishop’s umbrage at offensive behaviour at the Nadur carnival.
He wrote: “Whilst it is important to respect the different religions of the country, I find it very strange that the Bishop has time to condemn the Nadur carnival yet no time to talk about the construction of the Nadur cemetery where the water was poisoned and more than 5,000 trees will be killed and the livelihood of the Nadur farmers endangered. It has been more than two years that his ‘sheep’ had been asking for a meeting.
“Well maybe if the total value of the graves reach €3.5 m then the things will come into perspective. Now where is the carnival?!”
Attard recently excommunicated himself from the Church in protest at the Pope’s statements on homosexuals.
At 11:15am on the day he wrote the comment, the MRA’s director told him that his contract was being terminated because of breach of professional secrecy.
Attard said the director said he had been ordered by the ministry to halt his contract immediately after it was confirmed that the timesofmalta.com comment had originated from his office computer at the MRA.
But the Resources Ministry has categorically denied playing any part in the decision. The MRA yesterday also denied ministerial pressure over the contract termination.
The MRA said Attard publicly represented the authority in the energy directorate and that it had repeatedly warned him “on his misuse of the IT equipment provided to him by the MRA”.
The authority said he entered into public correspondence on a subject on which the MRA had made regulatory decisions.
Alternattiva Demokratika said Attard’s service to the MRA was in no way connected to water matters. “It follows clearly that the dismissal of Patrick Attard is an attack on the right of freedom of expression: a throwback to the dark 70s and 80s when human rights in Malta were more observed in the breach… An employee cannot be dismissed without prior warning and without being given the chance to defend himself. This goes against basic ethics.”
Attard’s lawyer Owen Bonnici, said the termination was illegal because his client had not breached professional secrecy and that Attard is not concerned with water issues.
The controversy over the Nadur cemetery centres around the excavations that wrought havoc on the local farmers’ spring water, which has now been contaminated by excavation works for a 600-grave cemetery owned by the Catholic Church.

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