Part of the controversy between the Ministry of Education and the Maltese Council for Sport on one side and the Malta Olympic Committee on the other seems to have arisen over the amount Lm21,000.

In my article in yesterday’s The Malta Independent on Sunday, I referred to this amount as if it had been not accounted for. In fact, it is not totally correct and may have given a wrong impression.

The Minister of Education, during a news conference last Thursday, said this amount, forming part of a government grant of Lm70,000, had not been covered by proper fiscal receipts on the part of the MOC.

But the Malta Olympic Committee is saying, as its president Mr Justice Lino Farrugia said also last Thursday, that they had not been told what exactly had been missing or where the MOC had failed in connection with these receipts. He added that they could think of some reasons for the non-acceptance of some of the receipts sent by the MOC, such as the airline tickets, bonuses, some VAT receipts, which were not the original ones, and income tax provisions.

In all fairness, the MOC president said that they had presented receipts though admitting that some of them had not been the original ones. The MOC claimed that in certain cases, involving a large sum like, for example, the issuing of airline tickets, it has become no longer possible to present the airline ticket itself as a receipt if an athlete or an official or both travel abroad to take part in a competition or any other activity or for any foreign official to come to Malta at the MOC’s expense.