He faked Joseph Portelli and politicians fell for it

George Muscat kept calling. Not once, not twice, multiple times, ringing an Instagram account he was convinced belonged to Joseph Portelli. The Nationalist Party election candidate was desperate to get through.

But on the other end, a man in the Netherlands stared at his phone and said nothing. He could not believe a budding politician had fallen for his satirical Instagram account impersonating property impresario Joseph Portelli.

Patrick Van Schaik is the man behind the concreteologist, the satirical Instagram account impersonating the developer behind Mercury Towers, Ħamrun Spartans, and what feels like roughly half the construction cranes currently taking over the Maltese skyline.

The account ran for nearly two years before Van Schaik came clean on April Fool's Day 2026 to reveal how people fell for his satirical provocations, including some renown names.

When he isn’t impersonating Portelli, Patrick Van Schaik is known for highlighting unsung modern buildings in Malta on his Instagram page Limestonejungle.

The bio, he insists, made it perfectly clear it was satire. He had listed the fictional Portelli as having a PhD in development, plainly noted it, and believed that would suffice. However, it was not enough for George Muscat, who never revealed in his messages what he truly wanted, only that he was calling repeatedly and that he had introduced himself in one message as a friend of Nationalist Party leader Alex Borg.

How it started

Van Schaik had actually started with a different account, one associated with the Buġibba Temple, the prehistoric site enclosed within what used to be the Dolmen Hotel. He used the account to complain daily about having a hotel built around it and about why nobody had created a proper heritage space for it.

He moved on from the account until he found out about Joseph Portelli, who, at the time, had no Instagram presence of his own and was the obvious candidate. “I realised that Joseph Portelli doesn’t have an account,” Van Schaik told MaltaToday from the Netherlands. “And I was interested in creating some sort of satirical account similar to Bis-Serjeta.”

Someone on Reddit called Portelli an expert penalty taker, referencing his president/player role with Nadur Youngsters before taking over Ħamrun Spartans. It was a detail Van Schaik was unaware of at the time. He coined the term ‘Concreteologist’ himself, a pun on his main account, Limestone Jungle, which is a play on the phrase ‘concrete jungle’. He added a humorous bio to the profile, awarded the fictional developer a PhD, and began following various users.

The methodology

The approach was methodical. He looked up every MP, local councillor, and mayor on Wikipedia and followed the lot, not particularly caring which party they belonged to. He added influencers; “stupid influencers that only focus on themselves,”, as he put it. He added journalists and media personalities. He followed anyone with whom he shared mutual connections, knowing the algorithm would recommend the account to users on that basis, and within months had over a thousand followers.

When private accounts, including, those belonging to politicians' wives, accepted his follow request, he realised the scale of what was happening. “That sort of blew my mind,” he said, “because I thought it was very obvious that it was satire.”

Churches, cranes, and Chris Cardona

Van Schaik says he deliberately avoided anything racist or anything that would make Portelli look genuinely terrible, sticking to posts that were funny but plausible—the kind of thing you could almost imagine a developer saying.

One post suggested that since Malta has 365 churches, some of them could reasonably be converted into apartment buildings, as happens in other countries. Another celebrated the demolition of a Richard England building in St Paul's Bay, where Portelli was behind the new development. The message prompted Raymond Tabone, a St Paul's Bay councillor who was at the time seeking re-election, to send a private message agreeing that the building was very ugly and that he was glad to see it go.

Van Schaik decided then and there that he would not be going into conversations with people. “I don't want to mislead anyone,” he said.

The Concreteologist also commented prolifically on posts by pages of local news portals, leaving cheerful, pro-development remarks under articles about approved buildings while the actual commenters below mourned their neighbourhoods.

Former minister Chris Cardona replied to one post, agreeing with a quote Van Schaik had lifted from a Planning Authority official who had said Malta is more beautiful now than it was 10 years ago. “I don't agree with this,” Van Schaik said. “I think Malta looks terrible now compared to 10 years ago.” But the Concreteologist agreed, and Cardona agreed with the Concreteologist, and that was that.

He said he even received messages to the account from journalists asking where he could find a property listing that said no Maltese allowed. It was a fake advert Van Schaik had posted as a joke about a Mercury Tower apartment, on the same day that a real discriminatory rental listing along similar lines had surfaced publicly.

Meanwhile, tenor Joseph Calleja messaged to say that the Concreteologist was the only “fake account” he followed, because it was so funny.

‘Thank you, Mr Presidente’

Then came Nocerina—an unknown Italian football club that was in search of a new president. When news broke that Portelli might purchase the Italian football club, the account was flooded with Italian followers and private messages. Fans addressing him as “president” and writing that they had been waiting for him; that he was going to save them.

When the deal collapsed, the tone shifted fast. Van Schaik said he already knew something had gone wrong before it even made the Maltese press because the messages had turned bleak days earlier. Internally, among Nocerina’s fanbase, something had clearly soured.

He had also, at some point, received an official message from the club’s former press officer, intended for the real Portelli, offering their help in closing the bid to buy the football club. “In hindsight,” Van Schaik said, “the real Joseph Portelli should have seen this message.”

He also received messages from people asking for jobs. Others asked if he could get them an apartment in Birkirkara, while addressing him as “boss”. Players from Ħamrun Spartans also sent messages, though Van Schaik, who does not speak Maltese, admits he was too overwhelmed by the volume to translate them all.

Perhaps the strangest detail is that some followers were never in on the joke at all. They had found the account through its enthusiastic pro-development comments and simply agreed with them, sending private messages praising Mercury Towers and thanking Portelli for what he was doing for the country.

The account had gained followers, Van Schaik noted, not just because he was following people and they were following back, but also because some genuinely liked what they were reading.

The gig is up

Van Schaik came clean on April Fool's Day this year, posting a collection of the more memorable messages on his Limestone Jungle account, prompting a wave of responses from people insisting they had always known it was fake. “If you're clever, it’s very obvious,” he told them. “But not everybody realised.”

If Portelli himself ever makes contact, Van Schaik said he would delete the account immediately and would love nothing more than to interview him. His contingency plan, should things go the way they did with another litigious Maltese public figure he also parodied, is to deny everything and say it was an April Fool’s joke.

Which, technically, it was.