Minister Konrad Mizzi’s “incompetence” over the delayed power station has saved the country millions as it meant electricity was still being bought for cheaper through the interconnector, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said today.

Addressing a political activity, Dr Busuttil said a PN study showed that the country had saved €130 million thanks to the government overshooting its March 2015 deadline for building the new gas-fired plant.

Dr Busuttil said the PN study showed that electricity from the interconnector was far less expensive than the prices that ElectroGas, the consortium behind the new power plant, would be charging the government for the next 18 years.

He said it was no wonder that secret companies were opened in Panama, as it made no sense “overpaying” ElectroGas by so much.

He pointed out that Konrad Mizzi, the same minister who negotiated the ElectroGas contract, had also opened up a secret Panama company.

Dr Busuttil pledged that a PN government would buy electricity from the cheapest sources and not take any notice of the “corrupt” contract signed with ElectroGas.
He insisted the government could have easily lowered energy tariffs if it wanted to.

Instead, he said, the "dirtiest government in history" decided to introduce a tax on soap.

The Opposition leader was critical of the 30-day consultation process given to analyse over 15,000 pages of studies about the power station and LNG tanker.

The government had first built the power station, got the tanker into port, and only now was it releasing all the studies for the process of obtaining a permit to operate it, Dr Busuttil said.

The Environment Resources Authority (ERA) this week agreed to extend the consultation process by 10 days, but this was still not enough time, Dr Busuttil said.

He called the whole consultation process a farce, and urged the ERA to not let itself be used by the government.

On the privatisation of three hospitals, Dr Busuttil said all the important details and figures had been redacted from the contracts presented by the government in Parliament on Wednesday.

“All the important dates have been deleted. How is this transparency,” Dr Busuttil asked.

Dr Busuttil noted that the contract to privatise the hospital was signed on November 30 of last year, just two days before Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri gave the go-ahead to open up bank accounts in Panama in which they were to place one million yearly.

He questioned how Dr Mizzi’s main concern was opening up a bank account in the midst of the privatisation of these hospitals.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.