Environment Minister Jose' Herrera defended the way Wasteserv hired workers in the weeks before the general election when he answered questioned by the Public Accounts Committee on Tuesday.

The Opposition’s line of questioning has in previous sittings focussed on a potential political motivation for the engagement of these workers, especially because just over 30 per cent of the recruits hailed from the first electoral district, which was contested by the Environment Minister himself.

In this vein, Committee Chairperson Beppe Fenech Adami asked the minister whether he thought it appropriate for the cessation of civil service engagement, imposed by law immediately following the dissolution of Parliament on May 1, 2017, to be sidestepped, and for workers to be engaged indirectly, through a contract of services with Wasteserv employment contractor JF just weeks before the election.

He also asked the minister whether he felt it appropriate to take “major decisions” during a time when he was still unsure whether he would be returned to Parliament, to government, and to his specific ministerial post.

Dr Herrera replied that he was not responsible for any decision taken by Wasteserv to engage additional workers, as he was not directly involved in the operations of what was at law a sui generis limited liability company. He had also not given specific approval for the increase in operational expenditure and in the entity’s human resource capacity, as such matters were often negotiated directly with Finance Ministry civil servants.

Prior to the election, he had requested that Wasteserv take part in a joint operation with the Cleansing Department to rectify the “dismal state” of littered Maltese beaches prior to the onset of summer. For this purpose, Wasteserv had deployed a mix of new hires and old employees. Wasteserv had also worked to supply a number of Natura 2000 bays with special recycling bins, and had deployed “a token number of 18-20 workers” to these bays to educate beachgoers on how to make use of these bins.

Dr Herrera stated that it was only after the election that he had instituted a task-force, composed of various Environment Ministry departments, to clean 36 principal valleys throughout the Maltese Islands. Together with other government entities, WasteServ had assigned workers, engaged through JF, to this task-force.

The valleys were being tackled two at a time, and four had already been rendered “pristine,” he said.

The task-force workers had removed invasive species from these four valleys, replanted indigenous species, and removed several thousand tons of waste which had been blocking water flow and posing a risk to persons living in the vicinity.

While stating that it was not the use to which the workers were put that was being questioned, Opposition MP Jason Azzopardi stated that it was the timing of the engagements in question that was the object of the committee’s inquiry. He asked the minister whether he thought that these engagements could in hindsight be considered as instances of “corrupt practice,” even though the government could legally continue to enter into contracts of service following the dissolution of Parliament.

Dr Herrera reiterated that the decision to request an increased workforce from JF had not resulted from any specific order issued by his ministry, and that he had never issued any order requesting the employment or promotion of specific individuals or groups of persons.

Stating that he referred those who asked him for employment to his ministry’s Customer Care Unit or to JF, who would then advise them on how to apply for any available vacancies, he said that the close proximity of government ministers to their constituents, owing to the small size of the Maltese Islands, could potentially open all MPs to allegations of corrupt practice.

The workers engaged in May 2017 would have applied months earlier, and the need for them would have been felt even earlier than that, he said, noting that Wasteserv tended to lose a percentage of new recruits within two to three months owing to the nature of the work.

Asked whether Wasteserv was foreseeing any further engagement of contracts of service in the immediate future, he replied that the additional workforce taken in 2017, together with a further 25 employees engaged through JF in 2018, was more or less meeting the entity’s needs.

However, other entities within his portfolio were experiencing a “dramatic lack” of workers and “exaggerated underemployment,” he said, and over 100 additional employees were needed to meet the needs of the Parks Department and others, for reasons including large expansions to Malta’s national parkland.