Konrad Mizzi increases Water Services Corporation wage bill by €2 million a year to buy votes for himself

The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Konrad Mizzi is in the process of increasing the annual payroll bill of the Water Services Corporation by €2 million a year.

Around 150 men who are registered voters in his constituency are being recruited abusively by the state water utility, for which Mizzi is responsible as the ‘Minister Within the Office of the Prime Minister’.

The abuse is multi-faceted.

1. The men are being recruited when there is no need for them.

2. Standard recruitment procedures are being bypassed so that the jobs can go directly to the selected men.

3. The jobs have been fraudulently created specifically for men who lived in Konrad Mizzi’s constituency, so that they can vote for him in return.

4. Konrad Mizzi is using public money and jobs with a state utility to buy votes. The money he is using to buy these votes is not a one-off, because when the election has come and gone, these 150 people will stay on the payroll at the state water utility and cost the public €2 million a year until they retire many tens of millions of euros later.

5. Those men are going to increase the cost of water production by €2 million a year.

6. The men were not unemployed but had jobs in the private sector. They have now been taken out of the private sector and their jobs there will almost certainly have to be filled by imported labour, which will create further demand pressure on cheap rental flats, pushing up the cost even more.

Yes, Konrad Mizzi is right now putting 150 men on the public payroll at a cost of €2 million a year to buy votes for himself, but the government is calling press conferences every day to tell us that the Nationalist Party taking €70,000 from Silvio Debono (to whom the government gave €60 million of public land for €15 million over seven years, interest free) is the scandal we should all be talking about instead.

No, actually, I’d rather talk about Konrad Mizzi and his €2-million-a-year jobs for votes scandal.