Malta in (slow) motion: how government spent €1.9 million on firm pushing its transport plans

After igniting a nationwide discussion about Malta’s traffic problem with the announcement of yet another mass transport plan, the government has yet again failed to provide a detailed breakdown of costs for a light rail line, which engineering company ARUP estimates will cost around €2.8 billion to build.

The €2.8 billion estimate covers the light rail line, which Transport Minister Chris Bonett presented as “the backbone” of a revamped, multi-faceted system – it does not include the additional investment which will be required to upgrade Malta’s bus fleet, increase the number of ferry vessels operating around the islands, and the new infrastructure which will be needed to service the upgraded network.

Therefore, the overall costs of this new mass transport plan are not yet known.

The scarcity of detail in the government’s latest mass transport plan, dubbed ‘Malta in Motion’, has prompted no shortage of cynicism, given the timing of the announcement ahead of expected general elections.

The fact that the new plan is a scaled-down version of previous, failed plans to build a metro, also announced before the last general elections, continues to linger in people’s heads.

What is certain is that the firm at the heart of the government’s mass transport plans has profited from direct orders awarded to it without any market competition.

An analysis of publicly available information shows that, between 2014 and 2025, ARUP was handed at least 19 direct orders worth a total of €1.9 million.

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Beyond ARUP’s involvement in the government’s mass transport plans, which are yet to get off the ground four years after they were announced, the engineering consultancy firm was also roped in to conduct studies for other major government projects.

Those projects include cost-benefit studies for major arterial roads such as Kappara Junction, the Marsa-Ħamrun bypass, the extension of the road from Mrieħel to Rabat, and the Santa Luċija underpass.

Closer scrutiny of the figures cited in Government Gazette records and past news reports about the government’s spending on its mass transport plans also raises questions about how ARUP’s fees are calculated.

According to the Government Gazette, a direct order issued to ARUP on 24 January, 2022 for “advisory services” related to the metro project cost taxpayers a total of €65,000.

In 2025, a Freedom of Information request filed by The Times of Malta showed that Transport Malta paid ARUP €260,000 to “revise” those same plans to downscale the metro project.

In simpler terms, ARUP’s revised plans cost four times as much as the original metro project.

Given the government’s open admission that ARUP’s original plans were far too costly to implement, the down-scaled version of the project raises further questions about why the engineering consultancy firm which markets itself as “a thought leader” did not anticipate such an issue.

Besides the immense financial challenges that will need to be overcome to bring the government’s new mass transport plans to fruition, the underground component of the proposed light rail line system, which would stretch across a total of 24km, would bring with it the same infrastructural challenges of digging beneath areas known for weak rock structure and archaeological remains, which would lead to significant delays and cost overruns.

Besides paying hundreds of thousands of euro for plans that are yet to result in anything tangible, the government had also spent an additional half a million euro on direct orders to set up of an elaborate stage to present its original plans in 2021.

The Standards Commissioner had found that Transport Malta had clearly broken public procurement rules in its pre-electoral spending spree for the metro project.

Given that the government publishes direct orders months (and sometimes years) after they are actually approved, it is not yet known what has been spent on announcing the new plans, nor who else was subcontracted to provide ancillary services to market them.

As he had done when the metro project was first proposed, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana has already expressed reservations about Transport Minister Chris Bonett’s new plans, publicly stating that he would not sign off on anything he deems financially unfeasible.