Environment and Resources Authority chairman Victor Axiak has excluded himself from further consultancies after his absence from the Delimara power station hearing due to a conflict of interest.
Prof. Axiak was not present for the meeting, which granted an operational permit for the new gas-fired power station and LNG tanker last week, due to a stated conflict of interest, having acted as an independent consultant on the project’s Environmental Impact Assessment.
His absence was remarked upon by Opposition leader Simon Busuttil, who said the chairman was “conveniently absent for all the important decisions”, having also missed the controversial Planning Authority hearings on the Mrieħel and Townsquare high-rise projects in August due to illness and hospitalisation.
His work as an independent consultant on the project predated his appointment to the board
A PN spokesman later told the Times of Malta that the party had not been aware of Prof. Axiak’s conflict of interest until the morning of the hearing, including during correspondence between the chairman and party president Ann Fenech, whose request for a private meeting with the ERA was turned down.
When contacted, Prof. Axiak said that he had made his conflict of interest clear to the ERA board – which includes a PN representative – at the earliest possible opportunity and rejected outright the suggestion that the party was not aware.
He also stressed that his work as an independent consultant on the project predated his appointment to the board of the (now-defunct) Malta Environment and Planning Authority, and his later appointment as chairman of the ERA.
Prof. Axiak similarly recused himself from the Mepa hearing in 2014 which granted the project a planning permit.
Asked whether his status as one of only a handful of local experts qualified to act as consultants on EIA reports would pose more conflicts of interest in the future, Prof. Axiak said he had not taken on any further consultancies since his appointment and would not do so as long as he served as chairman.
The Opposition has consistently questioned the ERA procedure that led to the near-unanimous approval of the new power station in last Thursday’s hearing, where PN representative Maria Attard was the sole vote against.
During the meeting, MP Ryan Callus labelled the public consultation process a “farce” and breach of the Aarhus Convention, a European agreement on access to information and public participation in environmental decisions.
He claimed the authority had failed in its duty to provide adequate scrutiny on the information provided by Electrogas and its consultants, while not giving the public enough time to examine the reams of studies related to the project and to analyse the authority’s response to submissions.