The Tourism Ministry recruited 40 new employees to replace the 20 who either resigned or retired over the last year, according to figures supplied by Minister Clayton Bartolo.

In answer to a parliamentary question tabled by Opposition MP Mark Anthony Sammut, Bartolo tabled a list of the new employees the ministry had taken on board between March 2022, the month of the last general election, and last January.

Bartolo said that over 10 months, the tourism ministry alone employed 40 new workers at the Institute of Tourism Studies, the Mediterranean Conference Centre – both managed by super CEO Pierre Fenech – the Malta Film Commission, the Malta Tourism Authority and the Foundation for Tourism Zones.

The largest number of new government jobs the ministry created was for the Foundation for Tourism Zones, which is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of certain touristic areas. The Foundation hired 20 new workers over the time frame while only one had left.

The Foundation was until recently being led by Edward Montebello, a former Labour Party reporter who is now heading the Prime Minister’s communications department.

A National Audit Office report in 2021 found serious corporate governance issues at the Foundation, as well as a total disregard for public procurement rules.

The NAO had criticised the Foundation’s recruitment process, which  saw several people being put on its payroll without going through the proper procedures.

Since 2013, the government has increased the number of state employees by more than 10,000 – over and above those who retire or otherwise leave government employment. It is calculated that over 1,000 employees retire from the public sector every year.

At the same time, many of those registering as unemployed have been put on government salaries, and taken off the unemployment register, via the so-called Community Work Scheme – a supposed training initiative managed by the General Workers’ Union on behalf of  the JobsPlus agency.

That, too, was taken to task recently by the NAO, which said it “is being rendered as an end in itself rather than a stepping stone towards gainful and sustainable employment”.

The scheme, it said, is tantamount to a “numbers exercise” aimed at keeping unemployment figures low by simply shifting the unemployed onto the scheme.

“Thus, every effort needs to be undertaken to ensure that this Scheme produces the desired outcomes, namely that improvements are made in the applicants’ employability skills, rather than it ending up simply as a numbers exercise whereby persons are just struck off from the unemployment list and shifted on to this Scheme,” the NAO found.