The EU Energy Minister is pushing to allow public funds to help build a natural gas pipeline to a power station in Malta, which is co-owned by a businessman awaiting trial for the murder of a journalist Daphne Caruana Galicia.
On Tuesday, officials and members of the European Parliament will begin to decide Phase out EU subsidies for fossil fuel projects.
However, the EU ambassador confirmed on Friday that Malta and Cyprus have been granted exemptions for the pipeline connecting them to the European gas network.
In practice, this means the 400 million euro (340 million pounds) Melita pipeline project, which aims to transport natural gas from Gela in Sicily to Malta, Can use EU funds to build.
Cyprus will also benefit from an exemption from the EU’s gradual support for fossil fuel infrastructure. The 7 billion euro EastMed pipeline is a bigger effort than the Malta-Italy pipeline-it will join Greece and Israel to join Cyprus in the European gas network.
This move was criticized by environmentalists because it would lock Malta’s dependence on the Delimara gas-fired power station, which is partly owned by the man accused of plotting to kill Caruana Galizia.
The Maltese businessman Yorgen Fenech was previously a director of ElectroGas, which operates the Delimara power station and, along with his family, owns a major share of the company. This year, he was accused of conspiracy to murder Caruana Galizia (Caruana Galizia).Prosecutor of Malta Recommended Life imprisonment, he was due to On trial. Fenech denied participating in the killing.
Prior to his arrest, he was the CEO of his family business Tumas Group, which worked with other Maltese families to acquire a third of ElectroGas. He owns shares in the joint venture through Tumas and an independent company. His uncle and Tumas chairman Raymond Fenech said he did not know the EU’s proposal.
“Yorgen Fenech is a minority shareholder of the Tumas Group, holding less than 4% of the company’s shares, and these shares are transferred by inheritance,” he added.
When Caruana Galizia died in a car bombing in 2017, he was investigating the award of the Delimara power station contract to ElectroGas.The Maltese police stated that they Believe she was killed Regarding her report on the power station.
Barna Bipes, a natural gas activist for the Corruption and Environmental Organization Global Witness, said: “This pipeline has the potential to allow Malta to use polluting fossil fuels and deal with fossil natural gas related to the murder of Daphne Caruana in Galicia in the next few decades. Project. The EU needs to put the interests of Maltese and EU citizens ahead of the interests of the big polluters and refuse to participate in another fossil fuel transaction.”
ElectroGas believes that when the gas-fired power station opened in 2017, it marked an improvement in the environment because it replaced a factory that used heavy oil, which is even more polluting than natural gas. Malta also gets electricity from the interconnector that connects it to Sicily.
Sign up for Daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter @BusinessDesk
Delimara is currently powered by liquefied natural gas transported by ships. Together with Sicily’s interconnection lines, it meets most of the country’s electricity needs. Only about 7% of Malta’s electricity comes from renewable sources, one of the lowest in the European Union.
An EU official said that Malta had the support of other EU ambassadors when it was granted a waiver on Friday. “Several delegations have made it clear that they are in favor of maintaining derogations,” the official said.
Eleven countries, including Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands, initially pushed to exclude existing fossil fuel projects from support. But with the support of most of the Eastern European delegations, Cyprus and Malta were able to point to the 10-year-old conclusion of the European Council that “after 2015, no EU member state should be isolated from European gas and electricity networks”.
