Govt publishes BEAT regulations and expands list of eligible sectors

The Gibraltar Government has extended the list of sectors that will be eligible for the BEAT Covid measures to support inactive employees amid the ongoing public health emergency.

This comes as the Government published its BEAT Covid-19 regulations on Thursday, setting out the legal framework it has put in place to help businesses.

The relevant sectors’ list has been extended from the previous list for the purposes of the BEAT Covid measures in the regulations.

This list of firms eligible for BEAT Covid support now includes security and cleaning related businesses, courier and freight businesses, estate agents, bureau de change and wholesalers who do not have a tobacco licence.

The excluded sectors continue to include businesses such as law firms, accounting firms, gaming firms and all firms regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission.

Speaking at the daily press briefing, the Minister for Commerce, Albert Isola, said that as of midnight on Tuesday the Government had received some 1,170 applications from firms covering a total of some 5,700 employees.

There have been a further 54 applications since then.

“Most of these firms will have had an email from us acknowledging receipt of the applications,” Mr Isola said.

“We have received some 780 email queries to our dedicated Beat Covid email and all but nine of these have now been individually responded to.”

“Each of these applications are being considered and scrutinized by the Employment Service, The Tax Office and the team at Treasury.”

“Any application can be referred to the office of the Financial Secretary for further investigation or clarification,” he added.

“In just a few weeks we have designed, built, processed and scrutinized data and details pertaining to a significant chunk of our businesses and working population,” Mr Isola said.

“In that time we have also developed and now published complex Regulations giving legal effect to our Beat Covid plans to support Employees in Gibraltar.”

In less than 10 days time, payments will begin to flow to support these employees.

All applications received by April 21 will be considered and processed by April 30. Those received after the 21st may take a little longer, Mr Isola said.

“Only Employees that have been inactive for the entire month of April will succeed.”

“Applications for the month of May will only be accepted by the system on or after May 5, for payment at the end of May.”

All employers and their individual employees will be notified by the Government if their application has been successful or not.

Appeals of Government decisions may be referred to a purpose-built Appeal Board.

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