Matthew Vella
His speciality is walking in on a piece of public land, staking his claims on the ownership and attempting to develop it for his own personal aims. Raymond Aquilina is no stranger to the art of speculation.
MaltaToday reveals the workings of individuals who sold land that did not belong to them to young couples and families, uncovering the unbelievable failure of notaries to have properly carried out their researches and misleading buyers into acquiring property on land they would never own.
Raymond Aquilina is facing charges of having sold property he constructed on land which was government-owned, hitting straight at the heart of young families who moved in apartments he built and sold to them within the area of Ta’ l-Ibragg.
His previous exploits already include an attempt at claiming ownership of land in St Andrews, for which he was found guilty of having removed the foundations of a construction in progress and erecting his own building.
The scam goes further. Another character, Gozitan Domenico Savio Spiteri, the director of Spiteri Holdings, features in the charges brought before Aquilina, whose company is Terra Mediterranea, as the man who sold land to the company irrespective of claims of rightful ownership of the land. The partnership is curiously not incidental.
The charges include wrongful trading on Aquilina’s behalf as director of Terra Mediterranea, accused of having misleadingly sold property which was government-owned. It had only been a year when owners of the Ta’ l-Ibragg apartments sold by Terra Mediterranea were rudely awakened to the news by the Lands Department that they were on property which they never owned, and which for that fact, neither did Terra Mediterranea.
The sheer calumny of Terra Mediterranea’s director saw him sell off the apartments at prices ranging between Lm88,000 and Lm95,000 to families and young couples with the false guarantee of the pacifiku pussess – the clause which guarantees buyers that the land they purchase is unequivocally theirs, without any further consequences as to whether others might have claims to the land.
Buyers who paid enormous sums of money, taking loans for which they would spend between twenty to thirty years to repay, were guaranteed they were the sole owners of the property, only to be informed just months later that the land was in fact the property of the state.
When reality struck home to the families living in the apartments they had purchased from Terra Mediterranea, it was with shock that they realised their notaries never conducted the required researches to confirm the sale of property was legitimate. Instead, it surfaced that all the buyers’ notaries had relied on the dubious researches conducted by the notary engaged by Terra Mediterranea. When buyers turned to their notaries and inquired as to what had happened, the definite researches confirmed their worst fears.
Terra Mediterranea in fact never had any title of ownership to the land. The company had purchased the land for the sum of Lm97,000 from Spiteri Holdings, in full knowledge that it did not have the guarantee of the pacifiku pussess.
The piece of land overlooking Triq Wied Mejxu on which Aquilina built his apartments was only a smaller piece of the larger tract of land which Spiteri Holdings sold him, allegedly purchased by Spiteri Holdings for the risible sum of Lm7,000 – a total area covering over seven tumoli – from the inheritance of Paolo Xuereb, a priest, and his sister Teresa Xuereb, through the execution of Monsignor Renato Valente.
It is doubtful as to what sort of claim Spiteri Holdings might have over the land it purchased from the inheritance of the Xuereb siblings. MaltaToday is informed the piece of land sold to Terra Mediterranea had been passed on from the Archbishop’s Curia to the government back in 1992, as part of the land agreement with the Holy See.
In 2003, four years after purchasing the land, Spiteri Holdings sold the entire area for a total of just under Lm1,000,000, a realistic valuation of land in Ta’ l-Ibragg. Within the space of four years, the value of the land had increased 150 times, a marvellous appreciation, and one which led legal sources to question how such an expanse could have been sold for just Lm7,000 back in 1999 and then sold for a million liri just four years later.
Spiteri Holdings sold this land to Terra Mediterranea without the guarantee of the pacifiku pussess. Terra Mediterranea, in full knowledge that it did not possess that guarantee, sold apartments on that land with the false premise that the land was to be unequivocally owned by the buyers.
Legal sources told MaltaToday this curious partnership has already operated under a similar pattern, reflected in a previous episode where Aquilina, as director of Terra Mediterranea, was found guilty in 2001 of having entered land owned by Marcus Marshall, Neville Xuereb and NMR Ltd, an area known as Tal-Misluta sive Tal-Franciz, and of removing the existing foundations of the landowners’ development which was in progress.
Again, Spiteri Holdings features as the company which was in the process of selling the land to Terra Mediterranea. On 4 August, 1999, the two companies signed a promise of sale agreement (konvenju). Spiteri Holdings claimed it had purchased the land sometime between 1990 and 1996 from an executor of wills, Rafel Gauci – much like the same claims in the Ta’ l-Ibragg scam.
The land in question had for hundreds of years originally been the property of the noble Testaferrata and Scicluna families, and which in 1989 was inherited by Marshall, Xuereb and NMR Ltd.
Then, in August 1999, Marcus Marshall received a phone call from Raymond Aquilina, who claimed the land in question was his, and not Marshall’s. Marshall and Xuereb inspected the site, to find out Raymond Aquilina had removed the existing foundations of a development they were constructing on this land with a bulldozer, aided by the services of his brother’s company, namely Tony Aquilina Ltd.
Aquilina was found guilty of trespassing on the land in question, in full knowledge that the title of ownership appertained to Marshall and Xuereb, and the company NMR Ltd, and of having commissioned workers to remove the foundations of the building in progress. The Courts found that Marshall, Xuereb and NMR were the rightful owners of the land.
Domenico Savio Spiteri, could not be held responsible within the merits of this case, since it was Aquilina who had breached the law. However, it emerged that Spiteri had authorised Aquilina to enter the land that he did not own.
The case never delved into the question of Spiteri’s claim of what title of ownership he might have reserved when he purchased it from the executor. It is in fact these forms of dubious claims that have landed Raymond Aquilina in court, once again on similar accusations, and with Spiteri Holdings featuring in another suspicious case full of bad faith.
matthew@newsworksltd.com
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