Right of reply: Administrative routine, editorial fantasy

The following is a reply sent to us by the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage with reference to the opinion by Patrick Calleja entitled Heritage watchdog in bed with the PA​, published in print on 03 May 2026 and online four days later.

Patrick Calleja’s latest attack on Superintendent of Cultural Heritage Kurt Farrugia relies on a familiar Maltese reflex—take an administrative arrangement, strip it of context, wrap it in scandalous language, and present it as proof of personal compromise.

His conclusion is that because Farrugia’s employment involved a loan agreement and reimbursement linked to the Planning Authority, the superintendent must somehow be institutionally captive to the very authority he is meant to scrutinise.

This is a dramatic accusation. It is also a profoundly misleading one.

Transfers, secondments, loan agreements and reimbursement mechanisms between ministries, authorities and public entities are not some extraordinary invention created around Kurt Farrugia. They are part of the normal machinery of Maltese public administration, used repeatedly across sectors to allocate expertise where government deems it necessary. Such arrangements are not privately designed by the officer concerned. They are approved through formal administrative channels, under the responsibility of ministers, chief executives, chairpersons, permanent secretaries and human resource departments.

In Farrugia’s case, the arrangement was processed under different heads of entities and different layers of administration. To personalise this bureaucratic mechanism as though it were a clandestine pact authored by the superintendent himself is simply false.

More importantly, Calleja’s argument deliberately ignores the one reality that actually matters—the statutory mandate of the Superintendent of Cultural Heritage.

The Superintendent of Cultural Heritage exists under the Cultural Heritage Act with a clear legal responsibility—to act as a national repository for the cultural heritage inventory, monitor the import and export of cultural heritage, monitor the conservation and restoration of movable and immovable cultural heritage, exercise control over archaeological excavations and monitoring, and advise the minister on heritage matters.

That legal remit is not rewritten by an HR reimbursement line. Nor is professional judgement automatically nullified because an officer has served previously in another state authority.

What makes the personalised attack even less convincing is that it ignores Kurt Farrugia’s professional trajectory altogether. Farrugia did not arrive at the superintendence as an ornament parachuted into an unfamiliar brief. He holds an honours bachelors’ degree and a masters’ degree in archaeology from the University of Malta, as well as a second master’s degree from a foreign university.

Kurt Farrugia, was appointed superintendent in late 2020 after years working specifically within heritage planning consultations and national cultural heritage management. His focus since appointment has been the execution of the superintendent’s legal function, not the bureaucratic plumbing through which public service salaries are processed.

During his tenure, the superintendence moved to strengthen its human resources and widen its technical capacity, with new officers recruited in different areas of specialisation in an attempt to make a historically under-resourced regulator more functional, and pushed Malta toward stronger engagement with international cultural heritage frameworks and conventions, amongst other.

There is also a further irony in the present chorus of condemnation. The Superintendence of Cultural Heritage is not an opaque institution operating in silence. Its work is documented and published annually in detailed public reports that outline archaeological discoveries, additions to the national inventory, conservation monitoring, policy initiatives, international obligations, educational outreach, guardianship deeds and the advice it provides to other authorities on development related projects.

Yet these reports are rarely discussed with anything resembling the enthusiasm now reserved for attack pieces. The projects undertaken, the events organised, the discoveries registered, the regulatory improvements attempted and the broader institutional workload of the superintendence seldom become matters of sustained public conversation. It is almost as though the office becomes visible only when critics require a villain, while its routine professional output remains inconveniently ignored.