The historic pension anomalies impacting hundreds of people will start being addressed next year but Edward Scicluna says compensation expectations must be lowered.

The Finance Minister said the government wanted to put a lid on the various claims of injustice that had dragged on for decades.

An €8 million fund will be set up next year to address these anomalies and will be topped up each year for the next seven years.

People are hurt

In an interview soon after presenting the Budget, Prof. Scicluna said the government had chosen to heal these “festering wounds”, even if it may have had a legal case to dismiss some of the claims.

“These people are really hurt,” he said, adding that the government had chosen a different course of action from previous administrations, which had ignored them.

However, he said that if all the claims had to be entertained, the expense would run into hundreds of millions of euros, which would be unsustainable. “This is an impossible sum, so they have to lower their expectations if they really want something. They have to be reasonable,” he said.

[attach id=539903 size="large"]Finance Minister Edward Scicluna. [/attach]

The injustices impact various categories of workers, mostly with State companies, who suffered a loss in pensions as a result of anomalies created during their working years.

Prof. Scicluna said the government could not settle all the grievances at once, since this would have a direct impact on the deficit.

Instead, a fund would be set up and a board would prioritise the grievances and pay out compensation every year, he said.

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