The consortium running Malta’s bottle recycling scheme has distanced itself from Keith Schembri’s Kasco group of companies.
“BCRS Malta has no connection with Kasco Group,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
The company’s public declaration comes in the wake of a Times of Malta exclusive which revealed how Kasco’s former CEO Malcolm Scerri had joined forces with Yorgen Fenech to lay the groundwork for a beverage container recycling scheme in 2014, before the government had ever announced it.
Those plans fizzled out as Scerri, Fenech and Schembri came under investigators’ scrutiny. All three are currently facing criminal charges – Scerri for money laundering, Schembri for money laundering and bribery, and Fenech for complicity in murder.
The recycling scheme was resuscitated in 2020, when the government handed the scheme to a consortium made up of the country’s largest beverage manufacturers and importers, named BCRS Malta Ltd.
BCRS' board features representatives of Farsons, Marsovin, General Soft Drinks, P Cutajar & Co., among others.
The scheme is regulated by Circular Economy Malta, a rebranded version of what was previously the Resource Recovery & Recycling Agency.
'Gratuitous links'
In its statement on Tuesday, BCRS claimed that it had been “gratuitously linked to political controversies” in the press, saying media reports “may have caused the public to form a mistaken impression.”
At no point did Times of Malta’s reporting link BCRS to Kasco’s original plan for the recycling scheme.
The report instead made it clear that the government had signed a licencing agreement “with the current consortium of importers, producers and retailers running the scheme” in September 2020.
Malta's beverage container recycling system began operating earlier this month, and BCRS says it has since collected more than 2.5 million containers to be recycled.
How the system works
The BCRS-run system sees consumers pay an additional 10c per beverage container in shops, which they then receive back in the form of a coupon when they dispose of beverage containers at one of BCRS’s 320 reverse vending machines.
Those machines are supplied by American manufacturer Envipco, unlike the Norwegian-made Tomra machines that Scerri and Fenech were planning to introduce.
Recycling coupons can be used in outlets that sell recyclable containers - though coupons obtained from BCRS machines at supermarkets can only be used at those supermarkets themselves.
How BCRS makes money
BCRS receives the 10c per bottle or can as soon as the container is placed onto the market, and keeps the fee for any containers that are not recycled. It also pockets any money earned by exporting bottles or cans for recycling.
Apart from paying BCRS the 10c deposit per container, beverage sellers and importers must also pay the consortium a one-time registration fee and fixed fees per bottle or can placed on the market.
Those fees, which are subject to yearly revision, range from 0.9c per bottle for plastic bottles to 3.7c per bottle for glass ones, according to information on the BCRS website.
The consortium, which says it runs a not-for-profit operation that will reinvest money earned back into the scheme, had initially planned to impose highly onerous registration fees on beverage importers.
After Times of Malta reported that small beverage importers faced being driven out of business by the market leaders that operate BCRS, the consortium said it would drop the fees – but only if the government gave it financial aid and also dropped the first year of licencing fees, amounting to €230,000.
BCRS subsequently said it would be waiving the registration fees that small importers were concerned about. The government has never commented about the consortium's requests for financial aid.
In its statement on Tuesday, BCRS said that it would be seeking to "better explain the operation of the scheme – which is similar to ones successfully in operation in various EU countries – in the coming weeks".
Its recycling targets were "more ambitious" than EU-imposed ones, a company spokesperson added.