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Gerald Fenech
The 1996-98 Labour government wanted to sell governmtent-owned land in Qawra to Maltacom for the price of Lm437,658, a cabinet memo issued by Joe Mizzi and Alfred Portelli confirms.
This contrasts with the stand adopted by the Malta Labour Party over the past weeks, with the Opposition leader repeatedly calling on the government to take back the Qawra plot it had transferred to Maltacom’s books as part of the privatisation process.
It now transpires that the Labour government of 1996 had already prepared all the necessary documentation to sell the land to Maltacom. In a cabinet memo dated 15 January 1998, then housing minister Alfred Portelli and minister without portfolio Joe Mizzi originally proposed that the Joint Office transfer the land to it for development for Lm 200,000.
The memo was actually tabled in Parliament in July 2006 when the House was debating a motion of no confidence in Minister Austin Gatt. However, the focus in that debate was the fact that the 1996 cabinet Labour memo proposes doing away with a parliamentary resolution to transfer land, which was in the public domain.
In fact, the motion of no confidence was based on Minister Gatt’s statement that the transfer of public land to TECOM Investments could be carried out without a debate in Parliament, as the government held a comfortable five-seat majority.
The land in question measures 10,500 square metres and was transferred on temporary emphyteusis from the Joint Office in 1991 for a period of 25 years, renewable thereafter for a further 25 years. The 1998 memo further states that in terms of the contract, if the land is developed, the current annual ground rent of Lm 3,000 would be raised to a figure to be based on the value given to developable land.
According to the memo, the value of the property, as given in 1991 in relative Annex to the Church/State Agreement, was Lm 85,714. Later on in the memo it is specifically stated that the land in question should be transferred by the Joint Office to the Housing Authority for a nominal amount of around Lm 10,000, and that the land should eventually be resold to Maltacom at a price of Lm 437,658, on the condition that it is exclusively used for social housing, including a regeneration project in another part of the island.
Cabinet approved both measures on 26 January 1998, according to an extract from the minutes of the said meeting. This newspaper is informed that the transaction did not go through only because the Labour government foundered after losing its parliamentary majority later in the same year.
The Qawra land issue exploded recently when Maltacom chairman Sonny Portelli, explained at a press conference to announce the company’s annual results that the land in question was on Maltacom’s books, and that the company had absolutely no intention of transferring the land back to the government.
This statement directly contradicted Investments and IT Minister Austin Gatt, who, in the press conference to announce TECOM Investment’s buyout of Maltacom, specified that the land in Qawra would be transferred back to the government as compensation for land held in “peaceful possession” by Maltacom to site its telephone exchanges.
The statement by Portelli caused concern at MIIIT, which hurriedly issued a statement to the effect that, if Maltacom did not transfer the land in question back to the government, the land would be reappropriated.
Financial and real estate agents have confirmed that the Qawra land would currently fetch around Lm 15 million at current development prices: over 30 times the price it was supposed to fetch nine years ago, a spectacular investment for Maltacom.
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