UPDATE: Aiken Services Ltd and the government/Labour Party campaign billboards

Aiken Services Ltd shareholders and directors

Customs Brokers Ltd shareholders and directors

Customs Brokers Ltd shareholders and directors (cont.)

Kap Services Ltd shareholders and directors

The Sunday Times yesterday ran a story about “illegal billboards” being used for government and Labour Party campaigns. It gave the billboard provider’s name as Aiken Services Ltd.

I thought I should look further at this story and so ran a search on Aiken Services at the Companies Registry. All the details are in the images shown here. The company was set up in April last year.

Aiken Services Ltd’s directors are Kenneth Abela and Bernard Debono. Its shareholders are Customs Brokers Agency Ltd and KAP Services Ltd. Abela represents shareholder KAP Services while Debono represents Customs Brokers Agency.

Now we’ll look at the shareholders, Customs Brokers Agency and KAP Services. The directors and shareholders of the former are a family of brothers called Debono. The directors and shareholders of KAP Services are Kenneth Abela (as above) and Alan Piscopo.

Alan Piscopo has an industry-related company of his own, AF Signs, which provides the billboard printed matter and other services to Aiken Services Ltd.

I spoke to Kenneth Abela (who was very polite and cooperative), who said that Aiken Services has 60 billboards and not 90 as reported in The Sunday Times.

Thirty of those billboards, he claims, have a full permit which renders them ‘permanent’. The other 30 are brought out and taken back in for ‘temporary use’, which the regulations allow for political and charity campaigns for a 28-day duration only, without a MEPA permit.

Yet even these are subject to law which governs their positioning – this time under the Transport Authority Act, which stipulates that no temporary billboards may be placed on a road at any time.

Read those regulations here: 32

An anomaly in the regulations, which fails to place restrictions on the time that must elapse between one ‘temporary’ use and another, means that these billboards can be technically put to year-round use, without a permit, by taking them away for a day after 28 days and then returning them the next day.

This is a bit like people who were in Malta on a three-month visa going to Sicily for the day and then returning on a fresh three-month visa (before we joined the European Union).

But even this practice of removal for just 24 hours between 28-day campaigns appears to have elapsed, with one 28-day campaign segueing into another.

Kenneth Abela told me that the 60 billboards were acquired and put up for the Labour Party’s general election campaign, two months up ahead and were meant to be removed a month after polling day. Aiken Services Ltd did not exist at that stage.

“But it costs a lot to make and acquire billboards and you don’t get your money back, still less make money, off one general election campaign,” he said.

“So when the general election was over, we began selling the space on the market, leaving the 30 billboards with a permit in place, and picking up the other 30 but retaining them for use in ‘temporary’ campaigns for politics and charity.”

When the MEPA-mandated period of one month following the election (for the removal of all temporary electoral billboards) elapsed, Kenneth Abela and Bernard Debono incorporated Aiken Services Ltd, in April last year and turned the Labour Party electoral billboards into a business.

The 30 permanent (with permit) billboards are sold to advertisers on the general market, while the other 30 are used for government and Labour Party campaigns and for the occasional charity promption.

I asked Kenneth Abela whether the Labour Party paid him and his colleagues for use of the billboards during the two-month general election campaign and the month that followed. He was not at all hostile or defensive when he replied, “I would much rather you put that question to them.”

I also asked him on what basis Aiken Services Ltd now sells its billboard space to the government for its campaigns which have included policy measures and the budget.

Abela replied that the company receives a request for quotations from the Auberge de Castille’s communications and PR office, and responds to that. “They might ask for a quotation around two or three months ahead of a campaign,” he said. “We send in a competitive quote and then take it from there. Other companies quote too.”

Abela gave me the price at which they sell billboard space to the government but asked me not to publish it because of the competition, so I need to respect that.

“We don’t have a contract with the government,” he said, “we work on a quote by quote basis.”

My next question was about whether the Labour Party has paid for any post-March 2013 billboard campaigns it might have had with Aiken Services, and whether Aiken Services is invoicing the Labour Party for the billboards it is using in its current European Parliament election campaign.

“I would much rather you asked them that, because the answer has to come from them,” he said. “But this is a commercial outfit and I will work with anyone, PN, Alternattiva.”

So now it’s over to the Labour Party to answer the question: is the Labour Party getting free billboard space from the company to which the Labour government gives its billboard campaign bookings?

Meanwhile, a note on the workings: the report in The Sunday Times estimated that Aiken Services Ltd has pulled in more than a million euros from renting “90 billboards each at 1,000 euros a month”. I asked Kenneth Abela about that. “Aside from the fact that it’s 60 billboards and not 90,” he said, “they are not all sold every month. There are some months when only 10 of them are sold, and depending on the number of billboards a client takes, the price can drop to 600 euros.”