Redundant Air Malta workers paid an average of €175,000 each

The Treasury Department has already issued a total of €61 million in redundancy payments for 351 former Air Malta employees who have resigned.

Taxpayers will meanwhile be spending an additional €10 million a year on government salaries for another 200 ‘extra’ airline employees who have been placed on the State payroll.

The imminent closure of Air Malta as revealed last Saturday by The Shift is expected to cost the public coffers several million more euros in redundancy payments and state aid for the new airline to be set up shortly.

All staff still on the airline’s books by then are expected to be laid off, with some benefitting from payment packages running close to a million euros.

According to the latest figures published in Parliament following questions tabled by Opposition MP Ivan Castillo, the government has so far paid an average of €175,000 each to the 351 airline employees who took up the early redundancy scheme.

A total of €60,836,332 has been paid and the process is now considered closed.

The 351 employees form part of a total of 577 who had applied to an alternative job scheme launched by Finance Minister Clyde Caruana before the last general election.

But just after that Caruana tried to change the scheme into a one-time redundancy payment. While some accepted, another 226 refused, with the minister having to reverse the decision.

The 226 extra Air Malta workers were then given permanent government employment on the same conditions they had at the airline, which will cost the government an extra €10 million in salaries.

Air Malta sources told The Shift that Minister Caruana is now considering paying tens of millions more to the rest of the current Air Malta staff, who are expected to be made redundant by the end of the year.

Pilots, the costliest employees of the airline, are insisting in behind-closed-doors negotiations with the minister on stratospheric payments of between €750,000 and €1 million each to relinquish their right to a unique early retirement scheme negotiated with disgraced former minister Konrad Mizzi and his then-consultant and current Prime Minister Robert Abela, in 2017.

The scheme, which Caruana described as ‘madness’, guarantees pilots the same take-home pay that they currently receive until retirement age – even if they don’t do any work at all. The minister is at present contemplating buying out the pilots’ ‘rights’ with still more taxpayer funds.