Former Air Malta workers bypass redundancy conditions with ministerial contracts

Former Air Malta employees who claimed their early and voluntary retirement schemes have raised a red flag over the employment of co-workers inside government ministries.

Under the national career's redundancy scheme, launched in 2011 in the wake of a massive downscaling of workforce prompted by Air Malta's restructuring, employees claimed as much as €60,000 on condition that they are not recruited in a public administration over the next three years.

MaltaToday is informed that a various number of former Air Malta workers who claimed the redundancy scheme are today employed as consultants with several ministries.

This newspaper has so far only confirmed that the ministries for social policy, and transport have employed former Air Malta workers on a self-employed basis with a contract for services.

The arrangement has allowed these workers to bypass the conditions of the Air Malta redundancy scheme dated January 2012, which would have required them to refund their redundancy money back to the government's consolidated fund had they taken up employment in public administration or the civil service.

Recent parliamentary questions to government ministers on the matter have revealed little of how many of these former Air Malta employees have been employed with government ministers.

As expected, their former co-workers who flagged their employment with MaltaToday have taken umbrage at the arrangement: "In my case, since claiming the redundancy, I have been registering for work with the Employment and Training Corporation and have been offered at least 20 postings in para-statal companies or other public authorities. I have had to refuse these jobs because otherwise I would have to refund my redundancy payment," one former employee said.

Similar complaints echoed suspicions that Air Malta workers close to the Labour Party administration prior to the general elections availed themselves of the redundancy scheme shortly before being guaranteed a contract of service with prospective ministers.

Over 500 employees working at Air Malta had applied for the early retirement schemes and voluntarily redundancy schemes, in a bid to save some 800 jobs that had to be retained for Air Malta to be restructured to competitive levels. Another 50 employees had applied for alternative jobs within the public sector.

After years of loss-making and a difficult restructuring process, Air Malta is planning to register a profit of €8 million in 2016. The airline's five-year business plan has been probed extensively by the European Commission and will take Air Malta from a €35 million loss in 2011 to profit-making in 2016. In July, Air Malta announced a €30 million operating loss at the end of its financial year in March 2012, registering an improvement of €4.3 million over 2011.