Mepa's audit officer still in limbo

Some two months after his appointment was officially renewed by Parliament, the Malta Environment and Planning Authority's Audit Officer, Joe Falzon, remains inactive after what appears to be a breakdown in communication between him and the authority.

Last April, some two months after his contract officially expired, Mr Falzon's appointment was confirmed by Environment Minister George Pullicino.

However, upon his reappointment, Mr Falzon found himself without a secretary, who was transferred to a different section within the authority, and without his investigating officer Carmel Cacopardo, whose contract expired last April but was not renewed.

To this day, the situation remains unchanged, which means in practice that the authority's Audit Office has not been fully operative for four months and has been completely inoperative for two.

With respect to the secretary, Mepa said yesterday that the authority's HR manager had sent Mr Falzon a letter on May 30 informing him that the authority was prepared to hire a new one from an agency to replace his former secretary.

Due to the current lack of human resources, the authority said in its letter, it was not able to re-deploy any staff to the Audit Office.

But Mr Falzon said he knew nothing about the letter. The letter, in fact, had been addressed to his office at Mepa where, Mr Falzon said, he had turned up for the past few weeks.

"I cannot work there alone, going there is pointless," he said.

In any case, Mr Falzon felt that the proposal of a specially hired secretary was still unacceptable.

"I asked for the secretary I had previously because she knows the authority and its people. Someone who is new to the authority and who knows less about it than I do will simply not help."

The central issue, however, remains the appointment of Mr Cacopardo, who is effectively the material author of many of the office's reports, seeing as Mr Falzon, who is also Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University, works part-time as Auditor.

The Mepa board last year deemed Mr Cacopardo "impossible to work with" but Mr Falzon threatened to resign should Mr Cacopardo's contract not be renewed.

Mepa yesterday said Mr Cacopardo's re-appointment had still to be discussed.

Mr Falzon said he would be contacting the authority to request another meeting to discuss the matter. In the past few weeks two meetings had been scheduled with the board but both were eventually cancelled.

Yesterday, the committee against the Marsascala waste recycling plant said it had lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman regarding the situation, claiming that the matter was hindering their contestation of the plant.

The committee said it had requested a meeting with the audit officer months ago but obviously it could not be held. In the meantime, the government's agencies were pressing on with the development irrespective of the pending procedures.

The situation, the committee said, was an injustice in their regard and that of citizens in general whose right to fair and transparent proceedings as stipulated by Mepa's own regulations was under serious threat.