PL will not pursue criminal action on Auditor’s report
Raphael Vassallo
The Labour Party has set its sights on the forthcoming parliamentary motion against the Delimara power station extension, due to be heard on 9 May, hoping to capitalise on widespread popular suspicions of ‘rottenness’ in the process leading to the award of the €200m tender.
Party insiders have admitted with MaltaToday they are not confident of overturning the contract, after the Auditor General’s report, tabled on Monday, stopped short of proving allegations that money had changed hands in the selection of Danish company BWSC.
MaltaToday is informed that the party leadership is “disappointed but not surprised” at the fact that Auditor General Anthony C. Mifsud, though largely corroborating suspicions of irregularities in the public procurement procedure, “did not come across any hard and conclusive evidence of corruption” in the proceedings.
Asked whether the matter would be referred directly to the police or a magistrate for further investigation, a party spokesman told this newspaper that Opposition leader Joseph Muscat prefers to concentrate on the forthcoming parliamentary debate.
Over the coming fortnight the PL will be sounding out individual government MPs in the hope that they will “stand up and be counted”, after a number of backbenchers had reportedly threatened to vote in favour of the motion at a parliamentary group meeting late last year.
Last October, MaltaToday revealed that a number of Nationalist MPs had warned their Prime Minister they would not vote in favour of government on this motion, unless they were convinced that the €200 million contract had been fairly awarded to Danish company BWSC.
However, in the light of the report’s conclusions, this now looks highly unlikely. In fact, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech – who replaced energy minister Austin Gatt in last February’s snap Cabinet reshuffle – was quick to emphasize the lack of any hard evidence of corruption in Mifsud’s conclusions, in his reaction late last Monday.
“The opposition was once more interested only in mud-slinging and that the country would not to have the power supply it needs for Maltese families and industry,” he told the press, though the words could just as easily have been directed at unruly PN backbenchers.
Later in the week, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi reiterated that the case for corruption had not been proven, although he did acknowledge serious shortcomings in the public procurement process, which he put down to “lack of experience.”
“None of these shortcomings were enough to nullify the contract,” he quickly added.
Questions however remain unanswered as to why the contract was drawn up in such a hurry, and especially why it places so few financial obligations on BWSC to complete the project within schedule; or why the government of Malta consented to be saddled with a hefty €300 million penalty clause, in case of defaulting on its side of the bargain.
Elsewhere, the choice of Lahmeyer International – blacklisted by the World Bank over corruption allegations in Lesotho – was lambasted by the Auditor General on the grounds that the same company had served as consultants to BWSC, and were also represented in Malta by the same Joe Mizzi, who also acted as middleman to the contract.
Mizzi himself came in for scathing criticism for the “evasiveness” of his answers, while the Auditor General pointed out that Enemalta Chairman Alex Tranter “should have resigned” over his apparent conflict of interest.
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