BWSC | Government's U-turn was to summon 150 witnesses before PAC?

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s dramatic U-turn on summoning witnesses to testify before the Public Accounts Committee on the controversial BWSC contract for the Delimara Power Station extension, is tied to an internal governmental decision to also summon its own witnesses, and according to Infrastructure Austin Gatt: “there are 150 witnesses to be called.”

Gatt - who was adamant in his position not to have any witnesses summoned before the PAC because it “undermined” the work done by the Auditor General, walked out on the same committee to stress his point and fell out with the Prime Minister when he tried to dampen the position - now “supports” the summoning of witnesses, and told the same PAC yesterday that he is “ready to go all the way.”

Last Sunday, the Prime Minister made a surprise announcement saying that the government was prepared to accept the summoning of witnesses before the PAC, and it now transpires that government has drawn up a list of witnesses to be questioned by the PAC to explain why they did not fully cooperate with the Auditor General.

Commenting on this u-turn, Minister Austin Gatt said: “I was indeed involved in the government’s decision to call witnesses which I support. I stand by what I said about Labour’s intentions for the PAC and I will continue to insist that Labour is not given a free hand to conduct a public lynching under cover of Parliament.”

During yesterday’s PAC sitting which continued to debate the BWSC contract, both government and Opposition persisted in trading salvoes on the issue, and while MPs discussed the summoning of witnesses, PL MP Evarist Bartolo sarcastically replied to Austin Gatt, “your 150 witnesses are 50 less than ours.”

Bartolo stressed that he expects the Opposition to be free to add to the list of witnesses to be summoned and not to be blocked by Minister Gatt as already happened.

Bateman replies

A spokesman for Israeli firm Bateman stressed that contrary to what Minister Austin Gatt said during yesterday’s PAC hearing, it [Bateman] had claimed all along that the evaluation formula was “biased” as it “did not consider the use of gas in the model and only covered a 10 year period.”

“We therefore provided calculations to the National Audit Office showing that if gas was introduced to the formula, and assuming a plant life of 25 years, then the cost of eurocents per KWH generated by a CCGT plant would be lower than that of the diesel engine,” the spokesman said.

Bateman stressed that the auditor never said that they were wrong in their basic claim of actual cost for Malta. “he just says that Bateman used a formula which is not in line with the tender parameters.”

The Israeli firm concluded that “our claim of course is that our calculation reflects reality (if gas is introduced) and not a tender formula, and the calculation was was based on “reasonable assumptions” because Enemalta denied the company access to the actual working file.

Bateman stressed that it remains intrigued by the fact that with the tender formula – even if Bateman sold the CCGT plant for free – “BWSC would have won the bid.”

“We wonder how a government that publicises an electricity generation plan (2006-2015) that explicitly calls for the use of gas turbine technology, issues a tender with an evaluation formula that actually prohibits the use of such technology, even if the plant is built and delivered to Malta, for free…” Bateman’s spokesman said.

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