For the record:

• No minutes were kept or signed by the parties of the meeting held on 4 November. Each party kept its own minutes. However, the letter sent by Sullivan Maritime to the GWU the following day reflect exactly the decisions arrived at. It should be pointed out that your article misses one crucial agreement – confirmed on tape by Tony Zarb on Smash Television – namely that after 1 January 2006 the shifts required by Grimaldi would come into force even if no agreement was reached;

• From an analysis of the company’s accounts it is clear that the company was losing money because although it was carrying an appreciable amount of cargo, the income derived was not enough to cover excessive expenses coming from three main sources – too many employees both on deck and ashore, too high wages and out-dated work practices. The simple fact is that from a study run by management under the chairmanship of Marlene Mizzi, in today’s competitive environment an injection of Lm2 million, redundancies, more efficient work practices and a subsidy of Lm 150,000 per year would still have led to losses.

• Apart from the above, the government ran six other re-structuring scenarios. All of these studies – together with the one mentioned above – have been published and all your sources need do is consult them. All show that there was never the possibility to re-structure Sea Malta unless crews were drastically cut, wages lowered and tours of duty changed. Today, we are all aware that that kind of re-structuring was a non-starter!

• The commercial reality emerging from these studies was very clear – the time of a stand alone Sea Malta was past and the only way to salvage the company was through integration with a bigger, stronger line that could produce economies of scale and use its excess manpower on other routes.

• Petrol and gas is transported to Gozo by Gozo Channel on a regular basis.

Jesmond Saliba

Communications Officer

Ministry for IT and Investments