The car hire industry has more than 7,000 vehicles lying idle and another 700 brand new ones that have just been imported but are still unlicensed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tony Meli, the president of the Rent-A-Car Association, said members were placing employees on forced leave as the business had come to a complete standstill.

However, the companies were inching closer to lay-offs “because there’s absolutely no work”, he said.

“We wouldn’t like to make people redundant but some members simply cannot afford months of salaries without any income at all. It’s just not sustainable in the long run.”

Some of us have even had to rent fields to park our cars

He added: “We cannot operate. We have 7,000 cars parked in various places just gathering dust. Some of us have even had to rent fields to park our cars because we do not usually have so many at once.” 

Tourists due to visit Malta cancelled their trip and others had called from the quarantine of their hotel rooms to say they no longer needed a car. 

Mr Meli said members were in talks with car importers, asking them to be flexible on their hire purchase payments.

The association has also written to Prime Minister Robert Abela requesting assistance to keep their businesses afloat.

The airport was devoid of people yesterday but full of cars with no one to rent them.

“We’ve asked the government to waive 40 per cent of the licence fees of cars which are not being used and the 11 per cent tax we pay on our already high insurance premiums,” he said.

The association had also asked Malta International Airport, where members park their rental cars, to reduce or waive the rent for this period.

When the new airport car park is completed, the rent would shoot up by more than 200 per cent, he added.

He said some of the measures in the government’s aid package would help, such as the deferral in payment of taxes, but what they needed was direct help with their biggest costs at a time when business was at a complete standstill.