Political pressure for specific individuals to be engaged at Wasteserv would come “from everyone, everywhere, and from all quarters”, former Environment Minister George Pullicino said on Tuesday.
Mr Pullicino, a former Nationalist MP, was testifying in front of the Public Accounts Committee, which is investigating Wasteserv’s engagement practices during both the Nationalist and Labour administrations.
Questioned about recommendations coming from then Prime-Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s office in an email in which he was copied, Mr Pullicino said that political pressure for specific individuals to be engaged would come “from everyone, everywhere, and from all quarters”.
He later said that persons had been recommended for engagement with Wasteserv by MPs from both political parties, and that his ministry had not discriminated between them.
The jobs for which individuals had been recommended, he added, were not particularly good ones, a fact to which the company’s high rate of employee turnover could testify. “If the jobs were so bad why was the Opposition so insistent on requesting an investigation,” government MP Robert Abela asked.
Mr Pullicino insisted that any recommended candidates would have had to sit for an interview, and said he never exerted pressure for individuals to be added to the Wasteserv workforce.
Parliamentary Secretary Julia Farrugia Portelli asked about an email sent to the minister’s chief-of-staff by Christine Borg from WasteServ’s human resources department, which provided a list of candidates “forwarded by your goodselves” and due to sit for an interview the following day.
Mr Pullicino said that the email could have been a follow-up to inquiries made by officials within the Environment Ministry after these had been approached by persons who wished to start working with Wasteserv, “for information purposes”, as a courtesy to the individuals in question.
Mr Pullicino defended the mechanism by which Wasteserv engaged the services of various employees by making use of an independent contractor, a mechanism which had been put in place during his tenure.
This method of engaging labour had proved effective because it offered sufficient flexibility to allow the government company to adjust to changing requirements without adding too many workers to the civil service payroll, he said.
Furthermore, the introduction of novel processes and technologies meant that the government could not be aware in advance of exactly how many workers would be needed to operate additional machinery.
Questioned about whether he was still in favour of this mechanism, which had been criticised by the Opposition, Mr Pullicino clarified that although he was not speaking on behalf of the Opposition, the Opposition’s criticism had more to do with the abuse of the mechanism than with the mechanism itself. Increasing Wasteserv’s workforce by 30 per cent in a single year “could not be justified”, he said.
Mr Pullicino criticised the fact that Wasteserv had been used as a vehicle for the quick employment of hundreds of workers to carry out work which was not in line with Wasteserv’s aims, a “shortcut” which was ill-thought-out.
Wasteserv’s function had always been to manage waste, and not to collect it, he added and if workers were needed to carry out cleansing duties in valleys, they should have been engaged by the Cleansing Department.
The company’s memorandum of association had been “stretched like chewing-gum” to excuse the use of its workers for the direct collection of waste, in an “intelligent” attempt to recruit several persons before the election.
The temporary engagement of a Wasteserv employee as his personal driver was a temporary and isolated instance, he said, which had been necessitated by the inability of one of his drivers to work due to a medical intervention, which could not be compared to the case under discussion.
Mr Pullicino said that the engagement of 134 workers had gone ahead despite a huge fire at the Sant’ Antnin waste management facility, which “coincidentally” happened just 10 days after the Prime Minister had announced the closure of the plant over a period of seven years.
Ms Farrugia Portelli objected strongly to what she perceived to be a “very serious implication”, and invited Mr Pullicino to speak to the Police Commissioner should he become privy to facts which differed from the official version of events.
The former Environment Minister went on to say that he would have suspended the engagement of workers - whether through contractor JF or otherwise - immediately upon hearing of the fire, and that he would have ordered the employees formerly deployed to the plant to be reassigned to Wasteserv’s other facilities.