PM’s ‘favourite’ soldier awarded €100,000 job, kept on AFM books for pension purposes

Tista’ taqra dan l-artiklu bil-Malti hawn.

Colonel Mark Mallia – deputy commander of the Armed Forces up to a few weeks ago – has seen his pay packet more than double after being appointed CEO of the beleaguered Identity Malta Agency on  €100,000 a year, according to the contract acquired by The Shift through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

Despite having no qualifications or experience in the sector, Mallia was selected by Abela to head Identity Malta for the next three years. There was no public call for applications for the post.

His contract signed just a few weeks before the last general elections gives him a basic salary of €87,000 a year, plus allowances for performance, transport and communications, which in total amount to more than €100,000 – well above the prime minister’s own salary.

Mallia has also been permitted to stay on the books of the AFM, despite his current job having no correlation with his former role.

This ‘special clause’ inserted in his contract allows him to spend time away from the military while remaining within the Armed Forces, qualifying him for a full retirement pension after 25 years on the army’s books.

AFM sources told The Shift that while the former deputy commander was selected by the prime minister for his new role, he got radically different treatment from other AFM members, who are often asked to resign, and lose all their pension rights if they leave for another job.

“It seems that even in the army, there is a special law for some of the boys,” an AFM officer told The Shift.

“Mallia is being treated with velvet gloves while we, normal soldiers, are not even allowed to do a part-time job, let alone work full-time in a different sector and keep our entitlement for a pension,” he added.

Mallia, who spent five years as the right-hand man of former President George Abela, the prime minister’s father, has built very good contacts with the Labour administration and was deemed to be very close to disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat and his wife, Michelle.

In 2013, immediately after Labour was elected to govern, Mallia set a new record for army promotions.  Together with the current Brigadier Jeffrey Curmi, he was given four consecutive promotions in a few weeks, catapulting him into the second-highest rank in the army.

Mallia also hit the headlines before the 2017 election, when he was the brains behind some 800 promotions given to army members before the polls. Mallia continued promotion interviews right up to the eve of the elections.

The Ombudsman, who investigated the ‘accelerated promotions’ given to Curmi and Mallia after the 2013 general elections, described the exercise as “the result of a tailor-made process to achieve a pre-ordained result”.