Another good comment that needs flagging up

Posted by Paddling Duck on the subject of Louis Grech’s and Ian Borg’s manifest failures in EU funds management and ‘implementation of the electoral manifesto’:

Crucially, the government thinks that it can use EU funds only as a way of implementing its electoral manifesto. It has created a new IT system called (MIS) to help it manage its electoral promises and is giving priority to the implementation of EU projects.

1. The Maltese electoral cycle and the EU budget cycle are different (one is 5, and the other is 7 years, starting and ending in different dates). If their aim is to use EU funding for this electoral-driven funding, many funds will be lost post-2017 as there will be no plan for them. Addio il-’mitejn miljun’ ta’ Ian Borg.

2. They are going to create a huge system which will be confusing and too large to manage.

3. The skills/people needed to implement EU and ‘tal-manifest’ so-called ‘deliverables’ are different, and so are the processes.

4. The processes needed to approve manage-during-implementation and manage-when-completed EU project vs a Malta one are completely different too. Look what’s going to happen with the gas power station. To satisfy the self-imposed 2-year timeframe it is not only funding for the gas pipeline which will be lost, but also that for the interconnector as it will be made redundant and hence Malta may have to return the money already taken and used in the work already done.

5. Given the calibre of the ‘persons of trust’ the government has chosen, who only care about the manifesto and think that EU funds are just a (excuse my French) ‘zejza biex terda’ minnha’, the non-renewals and transfers of competent people – well it’s prone to be a disaster.

6. Most importantly, the EU’s thematic objectives and their degree of importance (hence how much money can be used in a project, and the amount of co-financing which may be obtained) is different from that in the electoral manifesto

7. Ah yes, last but not least, the so called ‘MIS’ tool is just a copy/paste of the manifest elettorali ta’ Malta Taghna Lkoll (hence rigidly copied and won’t be altered even when difficulties are encountered ‘ghax hekk weghdna’). Work is distributed to people in ‘positions of trust’, for implementation, in the same way UN food aid is given out in war-torn zones. Again, imagine the calibre of thought behind this system. Consequently, you can imagine the difference between Malta’s partnership agreement which was heavily negotiated upon by the Gonzi administration for the 2014-2020 programming period and this ‘ktieb tal-weghdi’.

I rest my case.