Busuttil says he ‘took less than minimum wage’ from ECRS

Opposition leader Simon Busuttil has declared on PBS’s Dissett that he pocketed “less than minimum wage” over the past three years from the activities that his firm Europa Consultancy and Research Services conducted.

Busuttil is at the centre of a political row after ECRS, a legal firm he founded and which he resigned from upon becoming party leader in 2013, was revealed in a series of PQs of receiving some €1.1 million in government contracts under the former PN administration, a substantial amount of these being direct orders.

Faced with clips from his 2013 election TV conferences in which he said governments were obliged to be transparent in the handing-out of public contracts, Busuttil defended the practice of governments issuing direct orders.

“Contracts can be awarded by competitive processes or else government can choose a specific person. My firm had participated either in competitions, or by direct order because of a specific competence… just as someone seeks out their lawyer of trust, so does the government specifically chose people due to their competence.”

Busuttil played down the extent of ECRS’s history of taking direct orders, by saying that the only time government picked him specifically for a service was for his five-year tenure of the Malta-EU Information Centre between 1999 and 2004. “That was down to my competence… the other direct orders were intended at other members of our firm.” 

“The only time I was chosen was when government asked for me personally [to head the MIC]… this government has painted itself in a corner on the subject of meritocracy. The prime minister takes a €7,000 allowance by renting himself a car, a facility that I refused to avail of myself because I felt that it is a wrong example to set...

“I checked the ECRS audited accounts and in the last three years I took less than minimum wage, less than the PM’s own car allowance,” Busuttil, an MEP until 2012, said.

Citizenship

The Opposition leader said he will disclose all the names of naturalized citizens under the Individual Investor Programme through his position on the board regulating Identity Malta’s decisions.

But he was challenged over having flip-flopped on citizenship, having first demanded that the sale of citizenship be tied to five years’ residence and also binding himself to repeal the IIP if the PN is elected to government.

“Now that it is legal under EU law, I’m not going to be the one to change it… but it was thanks to our insistence that we got a residence requirement and the removal of the secrecy clause from its first version,” Busuttil said.

Busuttil also said that he expected his party’s MPs not to have a conflict of interest by having a professional interest in advancing applicants into the IIP. But he denied issuing such an instruction, as suggested by Dissett presenter and PBS head of news Reno Bugeja, to his MPs.

“I don’t give instructions on what someone does in their profession. But I expect our members not to have a conflict on the basis of their profession… I wouldn’t tolerate a clear conflict of interest,” Busuttil said.

Energy

Busuttil indicated that a new PN government would use the Malta-Sicily interconnector to its fullest capacity, banking on energy prices which he said would be “almost half that being charged under Labour.”

He shrugged off Reno Bugeja’s probing questions that the PN’s electoral scaremongering in 2013 had been toned down by a suggestion that the PN now wants to see an LNG vessel berthing in Marsaxlokk to service a new 215MW power plant, moored outside the harbour.

“This tanker’s capacity is double that previously earmarked in Labour’s two LNG tanks on land, and it carried a greater risk – it can be affected by inclement weather… the risk has increased, a risk that was not mentioned during the election.”

Busuttil said residents in the south of Malta had trusted Labour, but Labour had “used them and betrayed them.”

He said the reason that the PN did not register itself as an objector to the LNG terminal, which would have granted it the right to appeal the decision, was that planning objections were for NGOs and civil society to make. “We have our part to play in the parliament, and we leave it up to the public to decide on what we say. In two months’ time they will be able to use their vote to voice their opinion on the situation government has placed them in.”