Updated | Prime Minister to ask Auditor General to reopen BWSC investigation

Files related to the BWSC plant in Delimara, and which had never been published, will be sent to the Auditor General for investigation, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced on Sunday night.

The Labour Party’s newspaper KullHadd said these missing documents proved that then Nationalist minister George Pullicino had changed emissions legislation after being advised to do so by BWSC – and against expert advice – allowing the company to win the power station tender to create an extension at Delimara that would run on heavy fuel oil.

In a letter to Pullicino dated 27 November 2007, BWSC’s director Martin Kok Jensen and sales manager Erik Breiner Kristensen noted that, because of Malta’s strong environmental legislation on emissions, the company would have spend an additional €20 million to fall in line.

They therefore urged the minister “to revise the emission requirements as station in Invitation to Tender and allow the diesel engine technology to follow the same emission limits as specified for the gas turbines”.

When Enemalta was advised of BWSC’s request, they advised the government not to accede to the company’s demands.

In an internal 20 December 2007 memo,  the company’s chief technical officer Peter Grima insisted that the law should not be changed and said that BWSC’s technology, although cheap, was suitable “only for Africa”.

“This bidder (BWSC) seems to think that they can offer any type of plant, operating without limits or within their selected limits and that we will operate it in defiance of the law,” he wrote.

PN dismisses claims as ‘public domain’

In a statement issued on Sunday evening, the Nationalist Party welcomed the Prime Minister’s move, adding that what Muscat claimed to be revealing had been in the public domain for several years.

“So much so, that a discussion was held on the topic in Parliamentary Committee of Public accounts,” the statement read.

Outlining what the PN claimed to be Muscat’s “lies”, the Party referred to comments made by Muscat while the Labour Party was still in opposition, when he described the power station as a “cancer factory.” The PN said he had failed to keep his electoral promise of changing over to cleaner energy immediately.

“Despite saying that he was going to switch the power station to diesel the day after the election, Muscat continued to use heavy fuel oil for four whole years.”

“Shortly after the election he sold the power station to the Chinese,” it added.