New Air Malta ground handlers told to shape up or ship out

The operators of Malta International Airport have given the new Air Malta ground handling company a few weeks to put their house in order or risk losing their concession, The Shift is informed.

With confusion and chaos reigning supreme at the airport since the ground handling of Air Malta flights and those of a few other airlines were taken over by Aviation Services Handling Ltd – a new joint venture between the Aviation Services Spa and Air Malta – the airport’s operators have told the new company to either step up its game or move out.

Sources at the airport have acknowledged that while teething problems are natural when service providers are being switched, the new company is very clearly understaffed and not up to the job.

They say the new company’s “laid back” attitude, which has seen arriving passengers waiting almost an hour at baggage claim to retrieve their luggage, does not mesh with the MIA’s ethos.

The switchover from the fully-owned Air Malta company to the new foreign-staffed ground handling operator results from the airline’s latest restructuring bid, piloted by Finance Minister Clyde Caruana and Air Malta Chairman David Curmi.

Complicating matters further, on the day last week when the new company was to take over apron operations, it found most of the company’s vehicles – including passenger buses, lifters and other important machinery – to have been sabotaged.

A ground handler employed with the new company told The Shift that airport buses were left without fuel and oil, vehicles were found with keys broken inside their locks, and other destroyed machinery was all left behind by the now-redundant Air Malta ground handling employees.

“The offices from where KM ground handling operations used to be managed were literally ransacked, with human excrement found everywhere, including on pictures of the President of Malta. It was a total mess,” one employee said.

The Shift is informed that while it is understood that the saboteurs were former Air Malta employees, who were paid hundreds of thousands of euros in golden handshakes to leave the airline, police reports were not filed to “keep the incident as quiet as possible”.

The GWU, which is usually vociferous about its members’ rights, has also remained silent. The union had previously agreed with the government to close down Air Malta’s ground handling section and to make all its employees redundant.

The Shift is informed that foreign workers have replaced all former Air Malta ground handlers. Apart from the language barrier, airport staff members told The Shift that almost all the new employees were given zero training and still have little to no idea about what they are doing.

Air Malta – left practically bankrupt because of mismanagement and poor political decisions – is facing the prospect of being wound up if the European Commission does not accept the latest government proposal to inject millions of euros in state aid.

Caruana has described the audited accounts presented by the disgraced Mizzi, which showed the airline had turned a slight profit in 2018, as faulty and the result of creative accounting.