Matthew Vella
Apart from a week dominated by the power blackout that sent sales of electricity generators skyrocketing, Victor Scerri, the president of the Nationalist Party, has found himself in a rather embarrassing pickle.
Scerri appears to have purchased land from Eliza Company Ltd, whose shareholders are involved in an acrimonious battle to evict farmers from their land in Bahrija. This week, The Times got into the story with an unsigned news report about Scerri’s architect, the Nationalist mayor and MaltaToday columnist Robert Musumeci, for his ‘ability’ to secure permits even when they are recommended for refusal by case officers.
It would have been a straightforward report, had it not been for one minor detail. The Bahrija story originated a few weeks earlier in Labour’s weekly KullHadd.
Not many Times readers would have known this, since many do not read the Labour press. But if it is The Times picking up a Labour story – a rare occurrence given the newspaper’s loyalties – then it says much about what is afoot.
Sure enough, Robert Musumeci no longer enjoys the patronage of his party grandees. The PN has sidelined the Siggiewi mayor, who had publicly denounced his party’s mudslinging during a general conference, and whose private life is allegedly frowned upon by the party administration.
Because of the newspaper’s close ties to the establishment, a report like this – given the full glory of page 3 – means someone has fallen foul of the Nationalist party. Just like John Dalli, the minister whose airfare procurement from a canvasser’s travel agency was also published in The Times, and then used as a pretext for his forced resignation.
Scerri, an Austin Gatt man, is also close to the razor’s edge. Pressure is now mounting thanks to the environmental cavalry led by Astrid Vella’s Flimkien ghal Ambjent Ahjar. Now the opposition against Scerri can gain more legitimacy.
Scerri is by no means the victim. He bought ODZ land from Eliza, in itself a questionable affair since he must have purchased it at a time when Eliza’s director-shareholders were facing charges on the Villa Fiorentina art theft.
And why buy land that cannot be developed in the first place? Spending nine years trying to convince the MEPA planning boards to grant permission to build a larger villa over an old farmhouse (despite a case officers’ refusal) is of even greater concern.
But that’s what the green lobbies should be asking: when will Lawrence Gonzi’s reform of MEPA finally achieve fruition?
Scerri has a lot to answer for. As president of the PN, it is his party that stood silent in the face of massive ODZ development. And yet he had the temerity to question, in a press statement he issued this week, why it was his development that was being protested against “when there were larger and more prominent ODZ developments in recent years, on which nobody said a word.”
Will he say the same of the illegal permit issued by MEPA for Charles Poldiano’s ODZ supermarket in Luqa, which resulted in the mass resignation of a DCC board? It’s the government that was silent on the ODZ developments that flourished in the past decades. And it’s this recklessness with planning laws that has severely dented the few environmental credentials that Gonzi’s government ever had.
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