Dr Attard Montalto said that Malta needed its national sea carrier as much as its airline simply because as an island nation we need to keep open our channels of communication, travel and trade.
He said restructuring was becoming a buzzword that in reality meant making redundancies. “The Malta Labour Party’s policy is to distinguish between organisations that have simple economic value and those that have strategic as well as economic importance,” said Dr Attard Montalto.
The importance of those that fall in the latter category cannot be measured merely in terms of profit or loss, he said. “In this case its importance is communication by sea. What if anything serious happens in our Mediterranean region?” he asked.
Dr Attard Montalto said that Malta, being an island, needed its air and sea methods of communication. “Companies such as Air Malta and Sea Malta cannot be treated as just commercial entities. The country needs them to keep channels of communication and travel open,” he said.
This did not mean that they should be left to run at a loss. “They need to be commercial and competitive as well and they can be, if the right decisions are taken,” he said.
Sea Malta especially will have a lot more competition, come 1 May, when Malta formally becomes part of the European Union, said Dr Attard Montalto. “But I am convinced that it can have a bright future. For that to happen, one must analyse the viability of current routes and the possibility of opening up other routes as well,” he said.
He said that the company also needed to look into the suitability of particular vessels to be used on certain routes. “And we cannot forget that Sea Malta is also used in the import and export trade,” he said.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “In an ideal world, all the companies in Malta should make a profit. But we cannot overlook the strategic importance of some of them.”
Dr Attard Montalto said that in his experience, ports rarely made money, but they are always kept open because they are vital for travel, communication and trade.
“Sea Malta can, for example, enter into agreements with other carriers for line-sharing and the like,” he said.
He also said that it was wrong to simply decide that there was a need for restructuring. “Restructuring needs to be a continuous exercise. It is a long learning curve and people need to adapt to situations and be flexible as the need arises,” he said.
Government needed to safeguard the employment of Sea Malta employees, said Dr Attard Montalto. “The company must be creative to be competitive and to survive. It is only recently that it announced profits, so I’m sure that if the right decisions are taken, everything can be put back on track.”
He said that employees had told the MLP that they were being kept in the dark. “But on the other hand, Sea Malta chairman Marlene Mizzi stated that she too was being kept in the dark.”
Concluding, Dr Attard Montalto said that the situation was either one thing or another: “Either the Sea Malta board is also being kept in the dark or the employees are not being told what is going on by the company.”