The police are investigating the permanent secretary at the Education Ministry, Joseph Caruana, over links with his brother Edward, who is already the focus of a wider probe into suspected fraud and corruption at the Foundation for Tomorrow’s Schools.

A 2015 e-mail has surfaced in which the permanent secretary forwards to his brother – at the time an FTS employee in charge of school infrastructural works – confidential correspondence he had exchanged with the chairman of the FTS board.

The correspondence was about a ‘delay’ in payment of €400,000 to a tiling contractor engaged on a school project. The amount being claimed by the contractor, Avantgarde Ltd, was for extra works which the FTS board was, however, contesting.

In the correspondence, the then-chairman of the board, Samuel Formosa, first informs Joseph Caruana of a board decision to set up a working group to resolve the dispute. This was after “several significant discrepancies” were noted in documents presented by Avantgarde in relation to the works.

In his e-mail reply, Mr Caruana reprimands Mr Formosa, saying that “any further delay in settling this long-overdue matter is no longer acceptable”, and instructs him to make the payment.

One minute later, Mr Caruana sends his brother the correspondence in an e-mail marked “very urgent” and “confidential”.

Education Minister Evarist Bartolo, on whose direction Mr Caruana was acting in the payment dispute, was not copied in.

Edward Caruana, a former canvasser for the minister, was last year accused of corruption by the former chairman of the foundation, Philip Rizzo, who resigned after claiming the minister had failed to act promptly over his allegations.

Mr Bartolo denies this.

Any direct or indirect reference to any collusion is a fabrication

The police are investigating Edward Caruana’s handling of government school projects. They suspect that fake invoices, running into hundreds of thousands of euros were issued to the FTS for infrastructural works. Meanwhile, it emerged that Edward Caruana was at the same time building a block of apartments in Rabat without a bank loan.

The police investigation now includes the nature of the link between the Caruana brothers, sources have told The Sunday Times of Malta. The paper asked the permanent secretary to explain why he felt the need to inform his brother about his instruction to the FTS board over the Avantgarde payment, and why he kept the minister out of that e-mail.

Confirming that an investigation on the matter was under way, Mr Caruana did not answer the question but insisted he had nothing to hide and would have “no problem replying to any questions put to him” as part of the investigation.

“Any direct or indirect reference to any collusion is a fabrication,” Mr Caruana said in reply to further questions.

Mr Bartolo did not reply when asked whether he knew that his permanent secretary had informed his brother about the payment decisions. “A decision was taken, and it is the permanent secretary’s responsibility to follow up its execution,” a ministry spokeswoman said.

Asked whether Mr Bartolo had reported his permanent secretary to the police over possible “collusion”, the spokeswoman said: “The minister provided to the competent authorities all the information he had at his disposal.”

Last January, The Sunday Times of Malta revealed that the minister had ignored recommendations by the FTS board over the disputed works. As a result, Avantgarde was paid almost twice the value of the works it was originally contracted to carry out at St Ignatius College in Qormi.

According to a technical report commissioned by the FTS, Avantgarde was owed €540,000. However, it ended up receiving close to €1 million on a decision made by Mr Bartolo, who in turn was acting on a memo drafted by his permanent secretary.

Mr Bartolo has defended his action to overrule the board, saying he was trying to solve a situation he had inherited from the previous Nationalist administration.

ivan.camilleri@timesofmalta.com

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