Update 2 - Adds comment by Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg
Former resources Minister George Pullicino said in Parliament this morning that Parliamentary Secretary Michael Farrugia, who is responsible for Mepa, had stopped the Authority’s board from discussing a pending application for a waste treatment plant in Ghallis.
He said the incident happened when Dr Farrugia attended a meeting of the board.
He said €50m in EU funds had been earmarked to the planned Ghallis plant, which was to be similar to that at Sant’Antnin in Marsascala.
(Parliamentary Secretary Michael Farrugia later denied the claim and said this was an invention. However Mr Pullicino stood his ground, saying Dr Farrugia instructed then Mepa chairman Austin Walker on March 14 to stop a board meeting while it was hearing a presentation about the project. The application was also not put on the agenda of the board meeting o March 21, when a final decision was due.)
In a speech in parliament, Mr Pullicino asked if the government would follow up the waste strategy prepared by the former government, and which the then opposition had not voted against. Would it follow up plans to generate energy from waste?
Mr Pullicino also reacted to comments on alternative energy. He said that it was not true that Malta was totally dependant on oil for power generation. The push of the past few years meant that the equivalent of 10 per cent of peak power demand for electricity could now be met from sources such as photovoltaic units, he said. The former government had planned to further grow this sector through solar farms and photo voltaic units on the roofs of government buildings.
He called on the government not to delay a new scheme for further installation of photovoltaic panels by households, for which €21m in EU funds were negotiated by the former government.
(Replying later, Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg, who is responsible for EU funds, said the PV Scheme had not been launched to the public yet because of delays of three months at the time of the PN government. However, his secretariat had stayed in contact with the responsible EU agency and the funds would be issued shortly for the scheme.)
LAND RECLAMATION
Like Mario de Marco earlier in the morning, Mr Pullicino referred to the government’s land reclamation project and said this may not be economically viable – especially if islands were to be created - because the sea around Malta was deep and the amount of building material generated by Malta and which could be used for reclamation was not as big as some may think.
He said that under the old government, six possible sites for land reclamation were considered. They were then short-listed to two.
Dr Timothy Gambin, now a member of Mepa, considered two coastal sites at Maghtab and Xaghjra. The former was excluded for ecological reasons although it was the most economically viable. A land reclamation project at Xaghjra was estimated to cost between €250 and €440 million.
A proposal had also been made for land reclamation and the building of villas off the Jerma Hotel. He was not against the proposal but it had to be studied by Mepa. One also needed to consider the impact on the coastline.