Malta Enterprise (ME) approved almost €350 million in payments under the Wage Supplement Scheme, which was introduced to help businesses cope during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This information was tabled in parliament by Enterprise Minister Miriam Dalli in reply to a parliamentary question by PN MP Jason Azzopardi, who asked for the number of applications and number of beneficiary employees that received help by ME. He also asked how many of these applications have been accepted, rejected or were still pending.
Dalli said that, up until the end of January 2021, ME had received 21,855 applications in total for this scheme.
The majority of these applications came from companies listed under Annex A (14,987), while 3,465 applications are Annex B and the remaining 3,403 were not eligible.
Out of all the applications, 17,083 were approved, covering 92,443 workers; 54,101 full-time and 10,662 part-time in Annex A, and 25,020 full-time and 2,660 part-time in Annex B.
The total cost of these funds amounts to €345,942,993.
On 25th March 2020, the government announced a wage supplement scheme which was launched in order to aid businesses which felt the economic effects of Covid-19 and it has been extended every quarter ever since due to the benefits it provided for businesses to maintain employees and sustain their business.
However, the original system used throughout 2020 was changed following various complaints on unfair structuring. Previously, the scheme took on a fixed Annex-system, where different businesses were classified in different annexes according to their VAT number, with different annexes being eligible for different amounts of wage supplement.
Now, the revised wage supplement scheme is based on VAT returns and this has been well met by businesses in representatives alike.
In the same line of parliamentary questions, PN MP Joseph Ellis asked Prime Minster Robert Abela to give an update on the preparation that are underway at EU level in order to use the Recovery Funds that were allocated to Malta by the EU and when the government plans to use them.
“I am informed that the preparations needed to use the grants under the Recovery and Resilience Programme have started. Discussions are ongoing with the European Commission on this. Like other countries, it is expected that Malta will be starting to benefit from these funds later this year,” Abela said.