Tuesday, May 8, 2018, 06:15 by Paul Azzopardi, Director of Information, Valletta

No conflict of interest

Reference is made to the article titled ‘Konrad Mizzi’s father interviewing Air Malta employees’ featured on the Times of Malta and timesofmalta.com on May 5.

The article lacks basic facts which have been given to your correspondent and which were not mentioned in the article. Basically:

Resource Support and Services staff, including Lawrence Mizzi as chairman of RSSL, have only conducted information sessions with individual employees following their expression of interest to voluntarily take up alternative employment in the public sector. What is more, neither Lawrence Mizzi nor anyone from RSSL were ever involved in any selection interview with Air Malta employees. Air Malta employees are being interviewed solely by representatives from public entities so as to fill up approved vacancies based on criteria determined by the respective individual public entity. Being a voluntary scheme, each of the Air Malta employees may choose not to take up the position being offered.

In this context, there is hardly a conflict of interest – perceived or otherwise – on Mizzi’s part, since he is simply not involved in the selection process but is only carrying out his role according to RSSL’s remit as has been done in the past by his predecessor at what was formerly IPSL.