Ian Borg has been cleared of an ethics breach over €500,000 in direct orders for an exhibition to promote plans for a mass underground transport service, but the Standards Commissioner has said that public service procurement regulations should be changed to create penalties against individuals who bypass them.

The Standards Commissioner was asked by independent candidate Arnold Cassola to investigate whether Borg, who was then Transport Minister, had breached regulations over the award of the direct orders to TEC Ltd.

Cassola had questioned how Borg had awarded €500,000 in direct orders to TEC Ltd in a single day and whether him using the company for services related to his own electoral campaign constituted a commission.

He observed that in his declaration of electoral spending Borg had declared a spend of €15,000 on marquees supplied by TEC, an average of €2500 for each, when their usual price was €6,000.  He also claimed that Borg had misled the house about the nature and amount of direct orders granted to TEC Ltd.

To this latter point, the Standards Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi said that it was not his remit to investigate how Borg had replied to Parliamentary Questions, but was the remit of the Speaker.

Azzopardi ruled that it was Transport Malta as the authority responsible for transport which had organised the event in question promoting the metro, and not the Transport Ministry itself.

The Commissioner said that there was no evidence that the direct orders had been awarded on the specific direction of the minister.  However, there was evidence that Transport Malta had broken its own rules on procurement and direct orders for the organisation of the exhibition.

This being said though, he said it was not his remit to establish whether the direct orders were necessary or whether a competitive call for tenders had to be issued.  The Commissioner did not however that prior approval from the Finance Ministry for the direct orders was required – and no such prior approval had been sought.

This breached the government’s procurement regulations and the Standards Commissioner recommended that these regulations need to be amended so that officials responsible for such breaches could be punished.

The report was published to the media by Cassola after it was sent to him by the Standards Commissioner’s office.

On his part, Ian Borg, who is now Foreign Affairs Minister welcomed the findings and said that a discussion on a mass transport system for Malta needs to go on and pick up where it left off.