The 125 low-floor buses purchased by the government from their owners will be sold to the new public transport operator at a fixed price of €13,000 each.
A Transport Ministry spokesman said the price was established after working out the average price for similar Euro III vehicles on the second-hand market in the UK.
The price also deducts the cost to refurbish them and refit them with the fixtures required by the tender document, re-spraying them and the cost of shipping them over to Malta from the UK, including insurance.
The government will be paying the low-floor bus owners €123,000 for each vehicle and licence in a compensation package for losing their business.
The low-floor buses were introduced in Malta gradually between 2000 and 2005. Each bus cost around €105,000 of which the government subsidised €74,500. The government had spent €9,312,500 on the 125 buses that it will be passing on to the new operator.
"The purpose for this estimate (of €13,000) was not to artificially burden the price of the public transport tenders by the imposition of these buses on the winning bidder," the spokesman said.
The spokesman confirmed that the low-floor buses would only be used for the first three years of operation. After that, they would have to be replaced by buses running on engines that conform to Euro IV standards. From its fourth year of operation, all buses operating the public transport service must have a minimum engine standard of Euro IV.
The new public transport service will need at least 270 buses and around 600 bus drivers.
Under the compensation package, owners of old buses will each receive €103,000 while those who own low-floor buses will get €123,000. The bus owners who signed the agreement renounced their licence and instead have a 10-year guaranteed job with the new operator with a wage of at least €9,486 a year.
Sixty owners of old buses and four owners of low-floor buses opted to keep their vehicles and are therefore entitled to 10 per cent less of the compensation.
This means the government has committed just over €53.8 million in compensation to the bus owners: €32,445,000 for old buses, €15,375,000 for the low-floor buses, €5,562,000 for the licences of 60 bus owners without their bus and €442,800 for the licences of four owners without their low-floor bus.
A total of 405 bus drivers - 215 owners/drivers, 10 owners and 180 employed drivers - accepted a 10-year job guarantee against redundancy with the new operator.
Another 36 owners opted for an early retirement scheme offered to them by the government, modelled on the one offered to Malta Shipyard employees.
Only bus owners who were at least 56 years old by the end of the current year were eligible for this scheme. These will receive an annual pension of €7,215 which will start being paid from the first day of service of the new public transport operation and will stop once the beneficiary reaches pensionable age.
This pension is subject to yearly statutary cost of living increases applicable to pensioners.
Moreover, they will receive an annual bonus of €866, payable on January 31 of every year after the commencement date of the new operation. This scheme replaces the 10-year job guarantee so they will still be entitled to receive compensation for their bus and licence.