The Ombudsman has complained of flaws in the way interviews were conducted at Public Broadcasting Services for the appointment of radio and television coordinators, among other posts.

Joe Sammut in a report on the restructuring of PBS presented to Parliament yesterday said that records he had seen about interviews for the appointment of Coordinator Radio revealed that one board member allotted marks that were in sharp contrast and vastly lower than those awarded by the other four members of the board.

"Since there were indications that this assessment might have been motivated by personal, rather than objective considerations, it is understood that these four board members themselves were the very first to express concern at the way in which their colleague had steered the overall mark and contributed towards what was recognised as a freak result."

Mr Sammut said that in these circumstances, the board was right to order fresh interviews to be held with different board members from outside the company.

Another flawed result occurred during interviews for the appointment of Coordinator Television, when a company employee who was deeply involved in the restructuring exercise influenced the choice of the selected candidate.

"There is evidence to suggest that the same member of the selection board again influenced the result in the same manner even if this time the anomaly was less conspicuous and this member was consistent in the way that marks were awarded to the candidate who was adversely affected. In this case, however, the selection board accepted the flawed outcome to the detriment of the applicant who deserved the appointment. It is indeed poor consolation that the person concerned remained on the books of PBS at the end of the selection process when he was accepted for another position that was not his original preference."

He added that various shortcomings were also detected in the selection process for the Manager News and Registered Editor.

The Ombudsman observed that the applicant who ranked second, a former PBS employee with many years of experience in broadcasting, achieved a relatively high mark of 75.2 per cent. Even so, when the successful applicant turned down the post, the second ranking applicant was bypassed without any reasons having been given for this abrupt departure from standard staff selection practice.

The board decided to issue another call for applications without a proper evaluation of the merits of the other candidates who were considered qualified by the selection board. This amounted to a lack of transparency.

It was established that there was prejudice against the person who ranked second in the order of merit, because of allegations concerning his involvement in certain issues which took place when he held the position of Head of News between 1979 and 1986. "It is evident that in this case the restructuring exercise served not merely to downsize the company's workforce but also to discard an employee on the basis of allegations concerning his involvement in the broadcasting of news on the national station more than 17 years earlier."

The Ombudsman also considered procedures followed in the appointment of clerks. He said it was evident that the results of the interviews were applied too rigidly in the sense that although the pass mark was set at 60 per cent, "it must have been a somewhat blinkered, self-righteous and squeamish attitude to reject candidates who scored 59.88 per cent, 59.66 per cent, 59.50 per cent and possibly 59 per cent, when four posts were still vacant and there were no adverse reports about these four candidates.

Indeed, Mr Sammut said, rounding off, a very common procedure in similar circumstances, would have seen at least three candidates through without any alarm being raised.

In his conclusions, the Ombudsman said that following the government's decision to restructure PBS the procedure for the selection of applicants for the various positions in the new structure was determined and agreed by the government, PBS and the GWU. However, whereas the PBS board acted as if the company had ceased operations and launched a staff recruitment programme to fill the positions in the company's new structure, several employees seemed to be unaware of this strategy and were under the impression that since they had performed most of the duties that appeared under the job descriptions for the positions they had applied for, they had virtually an automatic right to be selected to the vacant positions.

"The selection process followed broadly the spirit and substance of the agreement that was reached between the parties involved."

It was however evident, Mr Sammut said, that the selection boards were under pressure to complete the exercise in the shortest possible time.

An assessment that was based exclusively on subjective criteria was not always known to give fair results, especially if applied blindly and rigidly. In view of the particular circumstances of this case, the board of directors in its decisions on staff selection ought to have been guided by more sensitive and less clinical considerations and should have moved away from an all too rigid reliance on averages and percentages.

He said that despite the way in which the staff reduction programme was packaged, there was no doubt that early retirement schemes and golden handshakes, generous as they may seem, did not make up for the moral and psychological distress caused to employees who had more years of active working life ahead of them and who were made to feel that their experience in their particular field was no longer useful.