Malta has had to refund more than half the funds it was given by the EU to help workers laid off by the textile industry three years ago.

The Employment and Training Corporation last March refunded €362,287 of the €681,207 it had been granted in 2008 to help retrain about 675 textile workers laid off by VF and Bortex the year before. This was done because the money was not spent. A spokesman for the European Commission said the reimbursement was in line with standard procedure in cases where EU funds remained unspent and stressed it was not a case of mismanagement of money, unlike the suspension of educational funds last June.

A government spokesman defended the situation, insisting that “the objectives of the project were achieved.”

The EU’s grant under the European Globalisation Fund goes back to mid-2007 when 675 textile workers were made redundant by VF and Bortex. The government had applied for EU help weeks after their dismissal. However, due to EU bureaucracy, the funds were only approved 12 months later, giving just a short time to the ETC to make the full use of the allocation, which had to be topped up by a similar sum through national funds.

In the meantime, many of the dismissed workers had already found alternative employment. In fact, according to ETC figures, by mid 2009, 427 (63.5 per cent) of the workers laid off were already gainfully occupied in another job and another 192 were classified as “inactive”, meaning they were not seeking a job.