Privatisation Unit is not under investigation, finance minister says about new superyachts process
Finance Minister Tonio Fenech has stated that with no investigation being carried out on the Privatisation Unit, the entity was free to restart the privatisation process of the Malta Superyachts facility.
The privatisation of this most lucrative of facilities from the four Malta Shipyards unit that were put on the market was stopped on 2 February 2010, when the government claimed that none of the offers had been satisfactory. The process was restarted yesterday.
Fenech has stated that Mimcol chief executive Mario Mizzi, formerly a member of the Privatisation Unit, is still suspended pending the police investigations into allegations of a bribery attempt. “He won’t be involved in the new privatisation process,” Fenech stated.
He was answering to statements by Labour MP Charles Mangion that the third privatisation attempt of the superyachts was being carried out while Mizzi was under investigation.
“It’s a pity the Opposition attempts to dampen every positive initiative, such as the White Rocks sports village and the shipyards privatisation with unfounded doubts and suspicions,” Fenech said in a statement.
Mario Mizzi was alleged to have asked one of the bidders to “take care of him” in return for a favourable outcome. After being questioned by police, Mizzi outed the whistleblower – former bidder and marine engineer Paul Cardona – in a judicial protest.
The superyacht privatisation has already been stopped twice: the first time was in November 2009 when government said the bids had been unsatisfactory. But the other side of the coin was that one of the bidding consortia had flagged the competitive process, after two individual bidders – Palumbo and Manoel Island Consortium, later the respective winning bidders for the Malta Shipyards and the Manoel Island yacht yard – were allowed to present a joint bid.
In May it was then revealed that a member of Lawrence Gonzi’s secretariat, Leonard Callus, had been told the Mario Mizzi allegation – as far back as September 2009. Instead of informing Gonzi, it would seem Callus only informed finance minister Tonio Fenech who himself did not report it to the police, but asked Privatisation Unit members to deny the allegations.
