No minutes used to be taken of Enemalta board meetings between 1999 and 2003, a former board member and ex-chairman of the corporation’s fuel procurement advisory committee told Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee yesterday.
Joe Falzon, a specialist in financial economics who teaches at the university’s Faculty of Economics, was questioned after PAC chairman Jason Azzopardi requested that Enemalta produce copies of the minutes kept during his time.
Prof. Falzon recalled that he had always been a staunch believer in hedging oil prices. But it had been an uphill struggle all the way until the board gave its first-ever approval in mid-August 2005.
Hedging when he first suggested it, with oil prices at rock bottom, would have saved the corporation $111 million in 18 to 24 months. But the corporation had never saved a cent in this sense because the board did not approve of the practice, even though he was only pushing for the hedging of part of the supplies.
Some amount of hedging had only been done between 1996 and 1998 under the government of Alfred Sant.
He also recounted how Enemalta had received a cash injection of €33 million simply by changing a $120 million loan back from euro to US dollars in 2000. The transaction had also saved $6 million in interest.
Prof. Falzon said that even in 2000 there were millions of liri in unpaid utility bills, and besides six per cent natural losses of energy production according to engineers, there was also an unexplained loss of 10 per cent.
He said he had never met then-minister Austin Gatt, and when he had insisted on doing so he had been referred to the PN club at Santa Venera for an encounter that had lasted just five minutes.
The minister had flatly refused to allocate two graduates to Enemalta for research but the professor maintained the corporation needed at least six of them.
The PAC is discussing the procedure followed by Enemalta and its oil procurement committee between 2008 and 2011 following a report by the Auditor-General that revealed a number of shortcomings.