Updated: Adds government reaction
The General Workers Union said today that it suspected corruption in the Fairmount ship conversion projects at Malta Shipyards and was requesting an inquiry.
General secretary Tony Zarb told a news conference this afternoon that this was a major scandal which was not due to a human error.
There were facts which were still being uncovered and the review conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers left many questions unanswered and raised more concerns, he said.
The people, Mr Zarb said, had a right to the truth.
But asked whether the GWU had any hard facts to prove its claim of corruption, Mr Zarb and deputy Geitu Mercieca insisted that their claims were the conclusions of the GWU report which should have been commissioned and drawn up by “a responsible government”.
The GWU drew up a 38-page outlining the details of the case and the facts showed the possibility of corruption, possibly on a large scale.
The report, Mr Zarb said, is being presented to the government and the opposition. The government had enough facts in hand to take action and the GWU was still insisting for a public and independent inquiry which hadto be taken on oath and which should investigate everyone, including the Prime Minister.
One of its terms should be to quantify the net loss of the contracts and who was responsible for it.
He said that the GWU’s calculations that the loss amounted to €80 million and not €37 million, as PricewaterhouseCoopers had established, had not been contested.
The GWU listed profitable projects which were undertaken by the same amount of workers, using the same tools and with the same working conditions and organisational structure.
This, Mr Zarb said, confirmed how the Fairmount losses were due to something that had gone wrong.
“The scandalous losses emanate from the contract conditions - yjr underestimated quote, the way the contract was negotiated and irregularities and mismanagement at the Drydocks.
MINISTRY'S REACTION
The Infrastructure Ministry in a reaction to the GWU statements, said the union had alleged corruption, but had not proved any.
Indeed, the ministry said, the union comments were a repetition of speeches made by the Leader of the Opposition.
The GWU had also repeated allegations it had made for several weeks, while ignoring the explanations given in the PWC report. Many of the questions asked in the GWU report had actually been answered in the PWC report, published some weeks ago.
The ministry said the government would evaluate the GWU report even though it was politicised and the union had not commissioned independent, professional investigators as Malta Shipyards had done when it engaged PWC.