For the past 15 years, Joseph Caruana, 79, has been fighting to receive a gratuity from a pension fund he contributed to when he was a port worker and is glad he may finally reap the benefits of his efforts.

The General Workers’ Union yesterday announced it was close to reaching an agreement with the government and was proposing a €28,000 payment for each of the 600 former port workers it represents.

Mr Caruana has been at the forefront in the battle for the gratuity. “I’m glad we’re close to an agreement. I have a wife and three children, who I am very proud of, and I am the grandfather of seven.

“One of my grandchildren is Amber, the singer, and she is a warrior like me,” he smiled referring to her song, Warrior, with which she will be representing Malta in the Eurovision song contest.

He said that, since 1973, he had been putting a third of his salary into a fund set up by port workers who planned to reap the benefits in the form of a pension gratuity.

“The fund was there for us workers and for our children,” he said. But when he retired in 1996 he received nothing. In 2000, he decided to do something about it and was one of those representing ex-port workers in talks with the then Nationalist government. No agreement was reached, however.

In 2006, hundreds of port workers who retired between 1973 and 2003 took the matter to court claiming they were being discriminated against because a gratuity from their pensions fund was only paid to port workers who had retired since 2003.

The General Workers’ Union’s general secretary, Tony Zarb, said the court case was on hold pending negotiations between the union and the government and he hoped a solution would be reached soon.

The union was proposing that every ex-port worker be given about €28,000. It has asked the ex-port workers and their heirs to fill in ad hoc forms by the end of April and has already received about 450 applications, 70 per cent of which were completed by heirs.

Mr Zarb said that, in 1973, port workers set up a pension and contingency fund that had about €39 million by 2007. The money was only meant to be used for specific purposes, including payment of pension gratuities and insurances. However, the Nationalist government used a large sum of the funds for the port reform he said.

As ex-port workers continued contributing, the amount stood at about €12 million, he added.