The former chairman of the committee that awarded the Delimara power station extension contract did nothing illegal by taking up consultancy work with a subcontractor of the winning company, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech said.
Mr Fenech did not commit himself over whether he thought David Spiteri Gingell’s decision, to work as a consultant for Vassallo Group, five months after the power station contract was awarded, amounted to a conflict of interest.
Mr Spiteri Gingell joined the consultancy firm Loqus, which formed part of Datatrak Holdings, in September 2008 when still sitting on the power station contract adjudication board that eventually chose the bid presented by Danish company BWSC.
The tender was awarded in April 2009 and, five months later, Loqus Consulting was approached by the Vassallo Group, a subcontractor of BWSC, to submit a quotation to carry out a strategic review of the organisation.
Speaking in general terms, Mr Fenech said Mr Spiteri Gingell would be acting in conflict of interest if the work he was doing for company owner Żaren Vassallo was also on energy provision.
“I cannot judge because I don’t know what he’s doing for Żaren Vassallo and... I’m not informed,” Mr Fenech said.
Mr Spiteri Gingell is not an employee of the government, he added, and there were no laws that prevented him from choosing any job he wanted.
“On the project itself he wasn’t an employee, he was a consultant, so he has every right to choose his work,” Mr Fenech said.
The €210 million Delimara contract has been a source of never-ending controversy and Mr Spiteri Gingell’s consultancy job with Vassallo Group has continued to stoke the flames.
“Unfortunately, in this country speculation is rife. We are a very small country, so people work with many different people. He is a consultant and he works with different people,” the minister said.
The choice of BWSC, which will supply eight diesel engines, was criticised severely on the basis that its technology is untested and uses polluting heavy fuel oil.
A report by the Auditor General had flagged a number of shortcomings in the way the contract was awarded. This included the choice of German company Lahmeyer International as an independent consultant to the contract adjudication committee, chaired by Mr Spiteri Gingell, because it was blacklisted by the World Bank for corruption.
The issue came to the fore again recently when the European Commission said that changing the environmental laws increasing the threshold of emissions that could be emitted by a power station just before the tender was adjudicated favoured diesel bidders BWSC.
Last week, the Labour Party criticised Mr Spiteri Gingell’s “shocking” decision to offer his consultancy services to Vassallo Group.
Apart from this, Mr Spiteri Gingell chaired the government-appointed climate change committee, which, according to Labour spokesman Leo Brincat, abandoned a decision that the country should opt for natural gas at the same time that the BWSC contract was signed.
Mr Spiteri Gingell had also been chairman of the government IT agency Mitts (now called Mita) up to July 2008. Loqus also provides IT-related solutions, also bidding for tenders issued by Mita.
Former Nationalist minister and Water Services Corporation chairman Michael Falzon agreed that, although Mr Spiteri Gingell had done nothing illegal, his consultancy link with Vassallo Group was “too soon”.
Similar concerns were expressed by independent analyst Martin Scicluna who said it was vital to ensure that senior public officials did not lay themselves open to “a charge of actual, or even perceived, conflicts of interest”.
Without entering into the merits of this case, he suggested the introduction of a cooling off period of two years between public employment and private practice to avoid accusations of conflict of interest.
Attempts to contact Mr Spiteri Gingell proved futile. An e-mail sent on Sunday and subsequent phone calls and text messages remained unanswered.