Grant Thornton awards

The Fellenberg Centre, today the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at MCAST, and Crimsonwing (Malta) Ltd are the two winners of the 2004 edition of the Grant Thornton Award for Enterprise and Foreign Direct Investment.

The awards were presented by Minister for Investment, Industry and Information Technology Austin Gatt last week at a ceremony at Le Meridien Phoenicia in Floriana.

The Fellenberg Centre was set up in 1974 as a co-operation project between the Maltese and Swiss governments. Approximately 800 Fellenberg electronics technicians were trained at this centre of excellence until it was incorporated into the Malta College of Arts Science and Technology in 2000.

Together with those that have gone through the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Institute of Information and Communications Technology at MCAST, they constitute the human resources backbone of the country's electronics industry and related services, including the Information and Technology sector.

Crimsonwing (Malta) Ltd, a provider of software solutions and software development services, was set up in 1996 and is part of the Crimsonwing Group, with offices in the UK and the Netherlands. Malta is the group's solution base.

The company devotes about five per cent of its turnover to Research & Development, is ISO9001: 2004 certified and last May was appointed Microsoft Business Solutions Partner.

Guests at the ceremony were welcomed by Grant Thornton managing partner Martin Bonello Cole. Nathan Goode, project finance director at the Glasgow office of Grant Thornton, spoke on the private public partnership solution to the financing of large ICT projects and Joe Pullicino, Grant Thornton IT partner, spoke on the firm's contribution to the development of Maltese firms IT capabilities.