04/10/2013 00:00
TW
0

Palma.—Palma's EMT public bus company is unable to pay their staff on time this month. Workers will have to be content with getting their salary five days late and with assurances that Palma City Council is “doing their best” to get people's salaries to them “as quickly as possible” despite there being cash flow difficulties.

Economy and tax councillor Julio Martinez said yesterday that he is blaming the previous Socialist City Council for the delay.

He said that his predecessor José Hila had followed high spending policies such as allowing free rides on the public service for the under 16s. Martinez said that this strategy was the same as the Spanish Prime minister having given a blank cheque to the public service sector and that both were now paying the price for misguided management.

Martinez argued that one of the problems the City Council and more widely the regional government is facing is that Central Government is going through public expenditure accounts with a fine tooth comb to see why local authority coffers are so empty. “The Socialist inheritance,” said Martinez, “has meant that the public bus company EMT is more than 15 million euros in the red.” Meanwhile, the General Workers Union representative at EMT, Antoni Puig, was indignant yesterday describing the late payment as “intolerable.” He claimed the City Council were using the occasion as propaganda to convince the resident population just how dire the financial legacy from the Socialist coalition government has been. “It's atrocious,” he said, “that about 600 families who depend on one of their members working for EMT are now suffering major anxiety over the future of their jobs.”