Gozo bus owners are furious they were only offered one-fifth of the compensation promised to their Maltese counterparts, saying this amounted to discrimination.
But the government rebutted saying there was absolutely no discrimination because the situation of bus owners in Malta and Gozo could not be compared.
A Gozo Bus Owners Association spokesman said the government had only offered them €20,000, when those who owned old buses in Malta were offered €98,000 for their vehicles.
He said the "excuse" the government brought was that the bus owners in Gozo would not go out of business like those in Malta once the new public transport service was up and running because they provided the Unscheduled Bus Service.
Contacted yesterday, the director general of the Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises, which represents Gozo bus owners, said the government's argument in offering such a measly sum did not hold water.
Vince Farrugia said the UBS or non-route aspect of the service would not be taken over by the new public transport service provider. But the unscheduled market was not large enough for all 86 buses in Gozo to have enough work to get a decent income.
With the new service, the Gozo bus owners would be losing at least 50 per cent of their income, he claimed.
Unlike bus owners in Malta, who received a subsidy amounting to €7.5 million a year, bus owners in Gozo did not receive any subsidy from the government.
He said that, according to the government's calculations, the new Gozo bus service would have to be supported up to 95 per cent as income from public transport on the island would only generate five per cent of the income needed to sustain the service.
"What GRTU and Gozo bus owners want is a compensation that, at least, equates to 50 per cent of the claims of bus owners in Malta who are asking for €177,000. Although bus owners in Gozo are not being asked to give up their vehicle, not all 86 of them can participate in the small market so they will effectively be out of business," he said.
Mr Farrugia added: "Gozo bus owners are infuriated seeing how the government is discriminating against them simply because they are a smaller crowd and are Gozitans."
The Transport Ministry said the two groups of bus owners could not be compared because they operated under different circumstances.
Gozitan owners had both a scheduled and unscheduled licence on their bus. They would stop working scheduled trips but would continue using their buses for unscheduled purposes, while the Maltese owners would stop both activities.
Moreover, Gozitans would retain their buses while the Maltese had to surrender theirs.
The spokesman said the compensation relativity did not exist because the GRTU was not comparing like with like. "One cannot merely invent a 50-per-cent relativity from thin air."
The spokesman added that the ministry had met the GRTU on several occasions and the association had drawn up a compensation proposal based on what it "presumed" were the yearly net profit of each bus.
"The ministry accepted this figure to the last cent and multiplied it by 10 years, which is what the contract period would have been. We have communicated this position to the GRTU and are awaiting a reply," the spokesman said.