The government’s position on eco contribution refunds and exemption mechanisms was very distant from what had been agreed upon, the Malta Chamber of Commerce and Enterprise president Helga Ellul said.

Ms Ellul said in the chamber’s newsletter that draft Legal Notices were published on November on Eco Contribution Refunds and Exemption mechanisms and Waste Recovery Scheme regulations.

Two areas of the “Refunds” legal notice were unacceptable, Ms Ellul said.

“The first relates to a dangerous discriminatory precedent that refunds would only be applicable to three particular clusters of products. Eco-Contribution, the chamber said, was payable since 2005 by all operators falling under the “producer” definition so refunds had to be paid to all “producers” who paid both the Eco-Contribution and waste management schemes subscription fees.

The same applied for exemptions. Discriminatory situations could not be endorsed by the chamber, Ms Ellul said.

The chamber took it upon itself to recommend to members to subscribe to recognised waste management schemes in the light of what government had maintained during meetings. So it felt responsible towards members who were now being discriminated against.

A clause in the refunds legal notice also stated that the refund due could not exceed the expenses incurred by the producer in the recovery of the products.

This meant that the companies would obtain a refund equivalent to the expenses paid to the waste management scheme which on a product-by-product basis worked out much lower than the eco-contribution they paid.

The legal notice also stipulated that a full refund was no longer on the cards but the maximum entitlement was 80 per cent, achievable with an 80 per cent or more recovery rate.

So it seemed that, as things stood, the maximum amount of refund companies could hope for was 80 per cent of the fees they paid to a waste management scheme, Ms Ellul said.

She said that these and other reservations were communicated to the authorities in the past days and the chamber expected them to be ironed out before the regulations were finalised and enacted.

“The consequences arising from these latest versions of the legal notices are serious and will have grave repercussions on the financial position of the law-abiding business community,” she said.