The new Italian owners of the Cospicua ship repair facility expect to see "tranquillity" and "flexibility" if the yard's international credibility were to be restored.
Antonio Palumbo, managing director of Palumbo Spa, said the company would seek to employ Maltese workers but refrained from saying how many. It was Finance Minister Tonio Fenech who said the company was initially expected to recruit about 100 people.
Speaking from the quay at dock number five where the official handover of the ship repair facility took place under a tent yesterday, Mr Palumbo said the company had to turn a new page and this would only be possible if everybody pulled the same rope.
Above him, a towering yellow crane stood idle as water trickled down into the empty dock below. Rusted bicycles once used by shipyard workers to travel within the massive facility - the walk from the main gate to dock 6 takes 15 minutes - lie abandoned just inside the gate.
The silence will soon come to an end but how soon depends on the success of the recruitment drive the Italian company recently launched in Malta, for which hundreds of former shipyard workers have applied. "It depends on the professional skills of employees," Mr Palumbo said.
The Malta facility is Palumbo's next major development in its 40 year history. The Italian ship repair company owns two facilities, one in Naples and another in Messina, but both are small-scale operations when compared to the capacity offered by the Cospicua dockyard.
When asked, Mr Palumbo discounted the suggestion that the company was not big enough to take on a much larger facility. "Naples and Messina are very strong operations but, as a company, we want to strengthen our portfolio by coming to Malta. The facilities we have are limited and Malta gives us the opportunity to expand," he said, insisting the Malta operation will be a success.
He explained that the ship repair facilities in Malta were a "dream" for anybody in the industry who knew the potential they offered. "We come here with a sense of responsibility. We know the history of the yard and that it also had a difficult past but we want to turn a new page and make it credible again," Mr Palumbo said.
The handover to Palumbo was described by Mr Fenech as a "very important" event and a "new experience" for the shipyard. "This development will turn the yard into a key economic player run by the private sector and no longer dependent on public subsidies," he said.
Mr Fenech defended the government's decision to privatise the shipyard, insisting it wanted the facility to be profitable and viable.
Equipment at the empty shipyard is being maintained regularly by an emergency team of about 40 employees, contracted on a weekly basis.
Parliament last week approved the transfer of the facility to Palumbo on a 30-year lease. The company will pay government €90 million over the span of the lease, which, at a discounted rate to take account of inflation, will amount to just over €50 million if paid today.
The company is also expected to invest some €30 million of which €23.5 million will be spent in the first five years of operation.
By the end of March, the last batch of 60 shipyard workers had downed their tools for the last time after they were offered a choice between taking one of the early retirement schemes or being employed with the government company Industrial Projects and Services Limited.
ksansone@timesofmalta.com