‘PBS requested my deployment to newsroom’ – Norman Vella

Norman Vella, a PN candidate for MEP who is claiming unfair dismissal from a seconded posting at the Public Broadcasting Services’ newsroom, told the Employment Tribunal yesterday that he had been posted there on request of PBS chief executive Anton Attard.

Vella is an immigration officer who benefited from five years’ unpaid leave to work with the Where’s Everybody production house. Yesterday he said that PBS chief executive Anton Attard had communicated to him the decision to have him deployed to the PBS newsroom after his unpaid leave ran out on 10 September, 2012.

Vella is suing both PBS and the Prime Minister on unfair dismissal, after he was redeployed back to his original posting as an immigration officer.

Vella was paid €16,000 annually by PBS – his basic salary as an immigration officer – and an allowance of €100 per programme, the same as other PBS employees.

At the time in 2012 and 2013, Vella presented the daily edition of TVHEMM, boosting his monthly salary by €2,000.

Vella joined the civil service in 2006 as an immigration officer where he is detailed at Malta International Airport. He was formerly a journalist for General Workers Union organ l-Orizzont [his father Karmenu was a former GWU trade unionist], and also had a stint with Labour TV station Super One in 1996. Vella was also a shop steward for the GWU, before he resigned.

In 2006 he applied for unpaid leave from the civil service to join Where’s Everybody. After 2009, his maximum three-year unpaid leave was extended by Godwin Grima, the head of the civil service. He would spend another two years on unpaid leave before being seconded to PBS on request of the OPM.

 Vella told the Employment Tribunal yesterday that at the end of May 2013, shortly after Labour re-election, he had “heard rumours that I would not last long at PBS.”

“The rumour was that Silvio Scerri, chief of staff at the Ministry of Home Affairs did not want me there anymore. After I requested information about my position, permanent secretary Kevin Mahoney requested to the head of the civil service [Mario Cutajar] that I be redeployed back to my immigration post. On 6 June, I was told to go back to my original job. There was still a month of programming left, and I had applied to be included in the following schedule,” Vella said.

Vella claimed that later on, he had been told that his post of Immigration Officer was essential to the department. “However following Malta’s accession into the Schengen area, immigration duties have been effectively reduced,” Vella told the tribunal.

Vella also told the tribunal that in 2008, then Opposition leader Joseph Muscat had requested that James Piscopo, then working at Air Malta, be detailed as an administrative assistant to Alfred Sant.

The Gonzi administration had initially refused the request. Later it acquiesced to have Piscopo seconded to the Labour Party as chief executive.