I refer to the article by Fiona Galea Debono (August 18) on the explanation by the Ministry of Rural Affairs for withholding funds to Pitkali Crates Ltd. The statement contains a lot of misleading information and missing figures. The €500,000 passed to Pitkali Crates Ltd. are part of the money which the government is bound by Legal Notice LN 54 1989 to collect from crate users, which money it is also legally bound to pass over to Pitkali Crates Ltd. These were not enough to meet the wages and purchase of new crates which amounted to €715,302. The latter figure does not include the daily cost of the running of the place in the way of maintenance like detergents, electricity bills and gas.

This has left Pitkali Crates Ltd. with a considerable loss. The tariffs have never been increased since 1989. Pitkali Crates undertook to wash all crates and recycle for free any broken crates without being bound to do so. The washing machine was purchased by Pitkali Crates. The government retaliated against these free services rendered by Pitkali Crates to the farming community by withholding a huge chunk, €200,000, of the tariffs collected or due to be collected.

The difficulties now encountered in the washing of crates are due to the placing of the washing area in an area that is smaller than 10 per cent of the space it had before 2004.

Prior to that date, Pitkali Crates always had at its disposal, for use by farmers, 15,000 clean crates daily. Crates were not allowed to be taken by farmers from pitkala but had to retrieve them clean from Pitkali Crates Ltd. The restricted speed of washing forces the farmers to wait for vendors to unload the crates being brought back for cleaning. Thus some crates are not being cleaned even after two or three uses. Some farmers do clean crates themselves. Washing of crates in the area allocated goes against the Health and Safety Regulations. The ministry is fully aware of this but conveniently ignores it.

This situation was seen coming when the government decided to turn the space occupied by Pitkali Crates Ltd into a grading station. In February 2004 Pitkali Crates wrote officially to the government warning of what was going to happen. These timely warnings were ignored, hence the prevailing situation. Since we were about to become members of the European Union we had to have a grading station, even at the risk of the supposedly all-important hygiene.

In that write-up the penultimate paragraph takes the biscuit. Neither I nor for that matter any person can transfer government property to others so how could any representative of Pitkali Crates Ltd be a signatory of the transfer of the area handed over by the Ministry to Ta’ Qali Producer Group. Moreover, the property in question had ceased to be in the hands of Pitkali Crates Ltd two years prior to being handed to TQPG. These latter took it over after another producer organisation refused the site in question. But of course this and more details will come out in court.