Parliamentary committee reaches agreement on Gzira lido concession

Parliament’s National Audit Office Accounts committee reached an agreement on a concession of a piece of land and sea intended to be developed as a lido complex. The concession will be valid for a period of 65 years.

Both government and Opposition MPs said they would vote in favour of the transfer, albeit with some reservations on the part of the Nationalist Party MP Mario De Marco.

The plans have been in the pipeline for some time, with a permit having finally been issued by the Planning Authority in June 2016.

The lido, which will include restaurants, swimming pools and an exhibition space, will be built on the Gzira strand, opposite Manoel Island. Parts of the lido will be built on reclaimed land.

The area in question will be transferred to a consortium made up of four Gzira hotels namely the Bay View Hotel, the Kennedy Nova Hotel, The Strand Hotel, and the Waterfront Hotel.

The lido, they argue, would compensate for the fact that they did not have their own pool facilities, while also improving the area’s touristic value.

During Wednesday’s session, De Marco made a case for amending the proposed contract for it to include the possibility of adding other hotels if this was necessary in the future.

De Marco said he had been approached by a representative from a nearby hotel, who claimed to have gotten in touch with the Lands Department roughly two years ago, about joining the consortium.

He said that without going into the merits of whether this particular operator’s case, many other hotels in the area did not have pool facilities and could benefit from a similar arrangement.

Limiting the concession to only four hotels, he said, could result in problems in the future.

“You will have the risk that other operators will say that, in the same way that these were allowed to build a lido through land reclamation, they should have the same opportunity,” said De Marco.

Moreover, he said that given that the intention of the project was to improve tourism in the area, the terms of the transfer should allow for the operators of hotels that might be built in the future to be able to become part of the consortium.

Parliamentary secretary for the property market Chris Agius said however that the case had been on going since 2006, after the operators of the four hotels had taken the initiative to propose the project.

He pointed out that there had been no requests or objections when the permission was granted in 2016 and that he could not understand how the committee was expected to change, at the eleventh hour, something it had been discussing for three days.

Similarly, government MP Alex Muscat said that while he understood De Marco’s point, it was easy for operators to want to be a part of the project now that progress was it was closer to becoming a reality.

De Marco insisted that the land in question was not private land but public land, and it would have made more sense for the lands authority to have checked with other hotels in the area whether they were interested in the project.

Michael Stivala, speaking on behalf of one of hotels and the secretary general of the Malta Developers Association, said that the hotels had been trying to push the project through for 25 years, adding that the operator that had approached De Marco had been approached at the project’s start.

He said that after agreeing to join, the operator in question had pulled out once it became necessary to invest money in the project.

Furthermore, Waterfront hotel CEO Maria Micallef said that the four hotels had a capacity of 1,000 beds between them, and that feasibility studies on the lido had shown that there was a limit as to the number of people it could take, especially when considering that the contract had been changed to allow members of the public to use the lido.