A few weeks back, the food courier, taxi and e-scooter company Bolt announced it has parted ways with local company TXF Tech.

The partnership came to an end in March, after which Bolt started to operate in Malta independently. Bolt’s aim is to strengthen its position as a market leader in Malta and “make the market more competitive and introduce its global procedures and processes on the island”.

Asked about details of the severance package, the former employee explained that “Bolt offered us two months of salary however in these two months we cannot work with a competitive company”.

“It is not bad however we still ended up without the job we had been working in from Bolt’s initial years in Malta where we were in a constant struggle to start the operations in Malta,” he expressed.

The whole situation left him and other employees feeling like they were left forgotten amidst the whole process.

“I feel that I was treated really unfair with Bolt, as they left us working for around three months without giving us any updates. I also feel that I was treated unfairly because Bolt Headquarters wanted to take over Malta because we were doing so well, if we weren’t doing so well they would have left us as a franchise, so it really doesn’t make sense to change the business operation when it was working,” he continued.

He explained that the company is now starting to employ much fewer employees, and working with a system of outsourcing. Through outsourcing, instead of having 25 customer support staff members, they now have around 12. 

“These are now all full-timers and in peak seasons (public holidays, Saturdays, Christmas, etc) they are calling in other agents from Kenya, obviously because they are offered inferior contacts and financially it would be beneficial for them,” he explained.

The former employee explained that while they were informed of the take-over in mid-January, they did not receive any other information between late January to March. However, the employees decided to speak to a lawyer about the situation with the take-over.

“They never send any emails about this, and we think that most probably this was done in order to not leave any trails of this,” he said, adding that they were being updated through a Telegram group chat. 

“Then in mid-February, they started speaking to us on a one-to-one basis,” he explained, as meetings were being called to get to know the employees. “In reality these were interviews,” he said.

“Finally, on 7th March, I received a call from the director (the director of Taxify Malta who is the company that took care of business before the takeover) and he informed me that the new company taking over had given him a list of 19 names who were not going to be offered a job,” he said.

“He also told me that he was going to try to arrange for a severance package so we would resign out of our own will in order for them to avoid legal issues in the future,” he said. 

“Unfortunately, we tried to form a group of people which were unwilling to accept the package but everyone accepted it as, after careful considerations, we were told from our lawyer and also from Jobsplus representatives that they would have been covered by the law if they had decided to fire us, but from our side, we would have been able to appeal, with the process being very long and costly and most probably I would still end up with a similar package,” he said.

Lovin Malta also reached out to Bolt for a comment on the matter, where an explanation was provided following the unveiling of the former employees’ situation. 

“Bolt operated in Malta via a partner, TXF Tech. The agreement regulating this partnership ended in March when Bolt started to operate in Malta fully by its group companies. Whilst we can’t comment on the agreements set up by the previous partner, we can confirm that, for those who continued to stay with Bolt, we had continuity of their agreements at the forefront of our minds and moved them over on exactly the same terms in order to make the transition as smooth as possible,” a representative for Bolt told Lovin Malta.

“Currently, we are working with the local team in Malta and introducing our global procedures, processes and company benefits. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to disclose further details due to the confidentiality obligation we are bound to.”

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