No General Workers’ Union officials have been asked to give evidence in a corruption investigation requested by the union a year ago on the granting of two ship conversion contracts by Malta Shipyards.

The union yesterday published a letter of protest sent to the Commission for the Investigation of Corruption in which it said evidence by its officials would be useful in the commission’s investigation.

The story revolves around two ship conversion contracts agreed by Malta Shipyards with Dutch company Fairmount in 2006, which led to the shipyard losing €37 million, derailing the little progress the company had been making after restructuring in 2003.

In 2009, a report drawn up by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the private audit firm entrusted by the government to investigate what led to the two major contracts becoming loss-making operations, raised serious doubts about the role played by marketing manager Graham Couser, who negotiated the contracts.

Mr Couser’s name surfaced at least 28 times in the 161-page report that shed serious doubts on his brief six-month stint at the shipyards before resigning in June 2006 after concluding the contracts.

The GWU yesterday also published a sworn declaration sent to the corruption commission last November by Sammy Meilaq, a former chairman of Malta Drydocks.

In his statement, Mr Meilaq said that against all practice and logic, Malta Shipyards had sidelined its professional management in the drawing up of the quotation for the conversion work and instead engaged an individual, Mr Couser, who produced a quotation which was drastically lower than what the management had been preparing. That had been seriously detrimental to the shipyard.

Mr Meilaq said in the statement that after some time, the dockyard inexplicably freed Mr Couser of all contractual links and obligations with it, making it easier for him to “escape from Malta”.

The dockyard, he added, had also accepted penalties on liquidated damages, thus going against all normal practice for contracts of this type.

Mr Meilaq said the dockyard had awarded sub-contracts worth several million euro without a call for tenders or quotations, without documentation and evaluation. The sub-contracts were awarded at a much higher price than the dockyard was to receive as payment from the client, when it could have done otherwise.

The dockyard, Mr Meilaq claimed, had not taken legal advice on the terms of the contract, as used to be done for major contracts in the past. It had also ordered management to “alter” documentation on costs so that the expenditure was shown to have been made on other works.

The dockyard also knowingly gave false information to the GWU on the main contract terms including the price, sub-contracting costs and purchase of equipment, he claimed.

In the accounts, the dockyard recorded a cost of €1,245,000 in training, when, he said, this was not the case. It also transferred funds to a contractor who, it knew, was about to go bankrupt and when it knew it was not obliged to transfer this money. Instead the shipyard could have taken action to protect its interests.

Mr Meilaq said these facts showed that this contract was drawn up and executed in a way which harmed the dockyard and this could not have been accidental. “Rather this was done in a considered manner, and constituted corruption.”