|
Karl Schembri
The national broadcasting station, PBS, is having another go at re-branding after a similar exercise attempted a year ago turned into a veritable fiasco when Investments Minister Austin Gatt scrapped the tender halfway through the process.
This time round, the station has sought the ministry’s go-ahead before issuing a public call for tenders last week, limiting the whole exercise to news and a few in-house programmes as opposed to the totally open-ended call issued last year which led the station’s former chairman, Andrew Agius Muscat, into trouble with the minister.
A spokesman for the minister confirmed that the ministry approved the exercise, adding that this time the station had set a “cost-benefit assessment” with a clear “scope of supply” in contrast with the tender issued last year which gave an absolute free hand to the bidding companies.
“Though an overall budget has been determined and the Ministry is aware of it, we do not consider it commercially advantageous for PBS’s spending possibilities to be announced while bids are being invited,” the spokesman said. The closing date for bidders is 31 October.
Among the disqualified bidders last year there was the company doing the marketing for Chef’s Choice – the company with which former chairman Agius Muscat was employed – while Where’s Everybody? had also controversially suggested in its bid to offer a daily viewership survey and a perceptions survey despite the fact that the same company had its own programmes on the same station.
Revealed by MaltaToday, the news of the two bidders’ involvement had infuriated the minister responsible for PBS Austin Gatt, who deemed the former chairman’s position untenable and who, unknown to many, is extremely sensitive to the fact that Lou Bondì of Where’s Everybody? happens to be his cousin. Gatt had directly ordered the chairman to scrap the whole tender exercise on the grounds that “no prior cost-benefit assessment had been made and no clear scope of supply had been constructed and included in the tender.”
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
Links: www.maltatoday.com.mt/2005/09/18/t9.html
www.maltatoday.com.mt/2005/11/13/top_story.html |
