Civil society group Repubblika has asked the National Audit Office to investigate how a top official at the financial regulator was given a golden handshake to quit and then hired by one of its offshoot agencies a few weeks later.

The NGO believes the lucrative arrangement could amount to embezzlement and wants the auditor general to launch an audit of the case.

George Spiteri, who headed the human resources division of the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA), was offered a six-figure early retirement deal to quit the financial regulator, Times of Malta reported last week.

Some weeks after he took the €150,000 deal, he was hired as head of human resources at the registry of companies – an offshoot of the MFSA set up earlier this year.

George Spiteri.

Other MFSA employees were simply transferred from one entity to the other, without being offered a lucrative early retirement package.

The government washed its hands of the matter last week, saying in a statement that it played no part in the MFSA’s staffing decisions, as the regulator was an independent body.

In its letter to the auditor general, Repubblika argued that the deal “in the best hypothesis amount to non-economical, non-effective and inefficient use of public funds, and in the worst hypothesis amount to embezzlement”.

The NGO offered to make itself available to the auditor general for any further information needed for an eventual investigation.