The Ernst and Young restructuring recommendations for Air Malta were bound to leak. The Sunday Times yesterday scooped the media with details of the draft restructuring plan. Air Malta employees will be asking, with good reason, why they have to learn details of their fate from a newspaper and not from the proper source. The airline’s chairman and CEO invited them for a meeting two days before the draft kite was flown. The only new thing they told them was that 511 would lose their job and that early retirement will be offered.

My guess is that the chairman and the CEO could not tell more. The restructuring report belongs to the government. It is the government that has allowed Air Malta staff to get an inkling of their faith through a leak, not by an honest-to-goodness update. The government may point out that the report is with Brussels and it would be inopportune of it to give details that might have to be changed. Maybe so, but, then, why the leak, which surely did not happen because some little bird told The Sunday Times.

Air Malta staff and the public cannot even be sure that what The Sunday Times carried yesterday is totally correct. As the reporter made clear, the basis was a draft report, not the final version. It is well known that someone within the government had also leaked that it had not accepted Ernst and Young’s first draft. (I don’t know why such report should be presented as a draft but who can tell what the hiring mandate was?)

While yesterday’s leak is not final, the discharges detailed in the draft are evidently the final version. Which means that Malta – not just Air Malta – will be losing some very experienced technical personnel. These will include 57 pilots, 53 cabin crew and 21 in engineering, in addition to 190 in ground operations and 190 in administration.

These are the individuals who have been crying out to know their fate so that they can consider alternative arrangements. From the leak they can now confirm that they will be offered early retirement. From studied replies by the Finance Ministry they also know they are unlikely to be given alternative employment.

Some of them may not need it and will work overseas. Others, especially those up from their late 40s among ground operations and in administration, may find it hard to get a job elsewhere.

Two things in the draft strike me. One is that Ernst and Young chose to look back but not long or deeply enough. For instance, they said nothing about how handsome financial reserves Air Malta had built up over the years, without a penny’s input from the state other than for the initial share capital, had been dissipated.

Also the draft is “scathing” (the reporter’s word) about the airline’s senior management team and blames it for a number of “poor” commercial and financial decisions. The consultants say nothing about the fact that, for several years now, the airline has been very tightly controlled by its political masters. It is easy to blame senior management, who will probably prefer to remain silent without pointing out it is not they who determine the date of an election and all that goes with it. It is tougher for consultants to say there was ungodly political interference.

Looking ahead is that the consultants made a number of proposals to raise costs to passengers. No doubt about it, new revenue generation is even more important than cutting costs. But one would have thought that, with the competition Air Malta is facing for low-cost airlines, a main objective should be lowering costs to passengers. The consultants do suggest that add-ons to passengers could finance cheaper fares but experience tells that such linkages are improbable.

Expect now the unions to be up in arms, especially about alternative employment. They would be well advised to heed the new chairman’s first words – the issue is not just about redundancies but about saving 800 jobs. That is a reality thought. Add to it that, as the consultants also emphasise, Air Malta is key to Malta’s economy. The conclusion is that sense and balance must prevail in the months ahead.

For that to happen, the government has to show that it really has a plan that works on all its pillars, without leaning unduly on shedding 511 employees. It has not done that, so far.