Why the ARMS fiasco is bad news for Air Malta
They had to drag a dead man into it to score a point, but the details shame them and, worse, foretell even more bad news for the national airline.
In Parliament this week, the issue of inflated ARMS bills was again raised.
At that point, in order to score a point, Minister Joe Mizzi dragged up an email sent by Wilfred Borg, who in 2013 was in charge of ARMS, to Tonio Fenech’s assistant Colin Calleja to prove, according to Minister Mizzi that the pro-rata calculation of energy bills was being actioned even under the PN administration.
It was a rather ill-conceived move – for Mr Borg is now dead and cannot reply to Minister Mizzi.
Had he been alive, he would have pointed at the sudden and abrupt way his term at ARMS was terminated – by no less than Minister Konrad Mizzi and on a direct feed by One TV, a public decapitation if there was ever one. Mr Borg had long worked at the top levels of Air Malta and was one of the very few to stay by chairman Joe Tabone on the night when a pilots’ strike was about to close down. He was, we might say, the
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troubleshooter in times of crisis. Anyway, he was later seconded to ARMS and was trying to do his best when one day Konrad Mizzi and/or his staff turned up and summarily ordered him gone. Thus began Konrad Mizzi’s retooling of ARMS which today, by the looks of it, does not exactly seem to be working.
Konrad Mizzi has carried over to Air Malta the same brash attitude and imposition. Newspaper reports these days tell of ministerial interference and a push towards opening more routes before the airline was really ready for the challenge. Then a new plane got delayed, some planes suffered from maintenance problems and last weekend flights had to be cancelled while delays mounted. Nerves got frayed, not just passengers but more importantly crew and the airline lost points all around.
And this from a minister who, from his boyhood, has been involved with the airline through his father who was a top official for many years. And from a minister who promised that the airline would break even by March.
The minister might argue all these problems are temporary glitches and will be solved in a few days but people go on holidays to rest and recuperate not to spend time waiting about in airports.
It’s the attitude that is wrong, the refusal to listen to sane advice, to consider prudent alternatives. ARMS has not recovered from Mizzi’s brusque treatment (plus the recruitment of people for partisan merits). Air Malta simply does not have the time to recuperate from bad decisions.
The prime minister, who has been extraordinarily patient with the minister even at a huge cost nationally and internationally over the Panama Papers and all that, surely cannot allow damage, real damage to be done to the national airline by brusque and illthought-out decisions.
A sane administration would also throw in a clear analysis of what happened in the energy sector under Konrad Mizzi where not only a power station was completed much later than planned but also where had it not been for the dratted interconnector brought in by the PN we would have been back in the dark ages. We don’t have that luxury where Air Malta is involved.