‘How quickly pre-election promises are forgotten’

PN Deputy Leader Mario de Marco said in Parliament yesterday that when Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was the Leader of the Opposition five years ago, he had stood up in Parliament and said that contracts like the ones related to Electrogas should be debated in Parliament before they are signed, “otherwise Parliament would just be conducting an autopsy”.

“That is what we are doing today, an autopsy, yet we don’t even have the whole cadaver. We have bits and pieces of it, and we are meant to conduct a full autopsy on it. This is what the Prime Minister wants to do today.”

“How quickly pre-election promises are forgotten,” he said.

Parliament yesterday discussed a motion presented by the PN back in June 2015.

Dr de Marco spoke about the censored sections of the contract, and urged everyone in government to read what was published, and say how much energy will be purchased from Electrogas, and for how long did government bind itself to do this. “There was an absolute blackout on the contracts and the basic understanding of what we have come to discuss today,

Meritocracy promises made by this government have now become a joke, he said.

“We had asked for this debate to be postponed, not because this side of the House was not ready as we have been waiting for it for over a year and a half. We wanted it postponed as we believe it is not right to debate contracts with hundreds of pages which were literally published a few hours before the debate, some of which were published last night.”

He asked whether government is keeping its promises that resulted in its election. He referred to transparency and accountability, “yet when one publishes more blacked out pages than white ones then they are laughing behind people’s backs.”

He questioned how much Enemalta would purchase energy from Electrogas, since the energy and electricity tariffs were redacted. Turning to the section called consequences of termination in the implementation agreement, he said that it too is redacted, and he asked government to explain what the consequences are.

Dr de Marco said that two days ago, the PN asked for the debate to be postponed, yet the Prime Minister stood up and said that the motion was not needed as government published all that was requested in the motion.

This motion, he said, “was presented more than a year and a half ago, on 25 June, 2016. It asked then Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi to table the expression of interest and request for proposals, and today I ask the Prime Minister, where are they?” He said the publication of contracts occurred a day and a half ago. He held up copies of the contract, highlighting the amount of redacted parts.

“The power station was meant to be completed in March 2015, he said, yet till today, two years after the deadline, the station is not yet done. They say, month after month, that it will start functioning, yet it still is not producing any energy”. Dr de Marco said that thanks to work by the past government, the BWSC plant was always able to be changed over to gas. “A government that promised to stop using heavy fuel oil is still using it even today.

“We also asked through the motion, what financial impact the two-year delay would have, who would pay for the energy tariff reduction given that the station is not yet built. We know that the reductions were thanks to the interconnector and the BWSC.”

He also asked whether the bank guarantee by government for the Electrogas project was offered to others during the request for proposals or expression of interest stage.

“The security of supply agreement is still not published. Why is this essential document not yet published.”

Government, he said, has signed the agreements on behalf of the Maltese people, and what was negotiated are not the assets of a government minister, but are assets that belong to the people.

He said that government will be removing the advantage of flexibility in this sector, “that can have repercussions on families and businesses. The reality is that over the past two years, government imported a quantity of energy through the interconnector, and thus had the choice to buy or import energy, and not just generate it. 80% of the energy needs were imported over this past year, thanks to the interconnector. According to an article published in The Malta Independent, we were purchasing the imported energy for 4c per kilowatt, and what was reported shows that government will buy energy from the new power station for 9c5 per kilowatt.”

“Can government say no to purchasing energy from the new station? Will we still have flexibility?”

Government revolutionised the energy sector Environment Minister

Environment Minister Jose Herrera said that government revolutionised the energy sector, which resulted in energy tariff reductions, and will see gas used instead of heavy fuel oil etc.

The Environment and Resources Authority, he said, was the one which closed the chapter on Heavy Fuel Oil, by giving the permit for the new plant to start operations.

The Authority is independent, and with eight votes against one, the permits were approved. Not only government representatives on the board voted in favour, but so did the representatives of the environment NGOs, and Professor Alan Deidun. The Opposition was alone and voted against. Today, the PN still seems to be opposing the change-over to gas, if not directly, then indirectly.

The work done on the IPPC permit began soon after the general election. It involved a public consultation, and the public was able to attend the decision meeting. This was a transparent process, he said.

The ERA IPPC process moved forward according to law, he said, and through this project, Malta will move forward.

He said that government is taking decisions today that previous governments did not, such as establishing ERA. “The Opposition leader wanted things to remain the same, and if it were up to him, the Marsa power station would still be in operation.”

Tourism Minister Edward Zammit Lewis said that while the PN says the published contracts are a whitewash, “under the PN we had a blackwash. The first opportunity the PN government had to use clean energy, they chose to go for heavy fuel oil.”

“Minister Konrad Mizzi had said in 2014, over a year before, that in due course the contracts will be published. Way before this motion was put forward, we were always going to publish these contracts. As for the Expression of Interest contract which the PN said was not yet published, it is on the Parliamentary website.”

He criticised past contracts by the PN government, and said that in the Maltco contract,” if it is published one would be fined, and the Malta International Airport contract was also never published. We are doing more than them. Yes, there are parts redacted, but there is commercial sensitivity, for both the consortium and for our country.”

Contracts ‘the mother of all evils’ Edwin Vassallo

PN MP Edwin Vassallo said the power station contracts were “the mother of all evils” – the government’s dirty dealings in the power station deal were the start of its “corruption experience.”

“These are barcodes, not contracts. The information that really matters is all blacked out.”

PN MP Ryan Callus, who pinned one of the redacted contract pages to his suit jacket, said some of the documents were published yesterday at 8pm. “We did not have enough time to see them. This reminds me of what happened when the government published 15,000 pages related to the LNG risk assessments and gave us just three weeks to go through them. This is not the hand of friendship, as the government describes it, but the hand of hypocrisy. The PM does not respect us. He does not want a civil debate.”

Mr Callus said this was nothing but an attempt by the government to deviate attention away from damaging issues, such as the Panama Papers scandal.

The PN MP said people were eager to have their questions answered. These included the price at which Enemalta would buy energy from Electrogas. But the government only published redacted documents, missing the most important parts.

Some parts, including the energy tariff section, were whited out, to give the impression that the information was not redacted.

People wanted to know whether it was cheaper to buy energy from the gas power station or the interconnector. Mr Callus said government MP Etienne Grech, who spoke right before him, had confirmed that electricity from the interconnector was cheaper. “At least one PL MP had the courage to say what Konrad Mizzi has been trying to hide.”

He accused the government of binding the country to buy energy at more expensive rates for the next 18 years, warning that someone would someday have to answer for this.

The Labour Party’s criticism of the BWSC plant was unfair, he said, pointing out that Malta was currently only generating energy from gas from the so-called ‘Yellow Pages’ power station.

Economy Minister Chris Cardona said the whole issue could be explained in a number of points. The project led to cheaper bills, security of supply and the introduction of an energy mix and the continuation of the Malta-Sicily pipeline project. The project was approved by the European Commission, which showed that this was a transparent government. The investment has also saved Enemalta and strengthened the economy.

Dr Cardona said he was perplexed at how PN MPs were complaining about the redaction of commercially sensitive parts. What counts is that Malta has cleaner air and cheaper tariffs, he said.