Former minister unfazed by Muscat’s bluster on encroachments

Former Nationalist minister for lands Jason Azzopardi has told MaltaToday he was unaware that the Government Property Department had taken the leaseholders of Café Premier, Cities Entertainment, to court in late 2012 after the company failed to pay over €200,000 in rental arrears.

The former minister was reacting to statements by the government after former Commissioner of Land Joe Bugeja said that a reason for his departure from the GPD was related to the way the Office of the Prime Minister excluded the department on the €4.2 million reacquisition of the 65-year-lease from Cities Entertainment (CE) after cancelling court action against the company.

Yesterday the government said in a statement that Bugeja “never flagged specific reservations” in his resignation letter to the government, “nor did he ever mention the Premier issue” with the responsible parliamentary secretary.

Questioned by MaltaToday during a press conference earlier Saturday afternoon, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat reiterated that Bugeja had “nine months during which he could have complained” about the Café Premier bailout.

“As a regulator, it would have been his duty to flag specific reservations had he had them. Furthermore, he never met or sought a meeting with the Prime Minister on this or any other case,” a government spokesperson said.

The government said that Bugeja handed in his resignation nine months after the signing of the said contract. “The government would not have been surprised had Bugeja decided to resign in the wake of the Fekruna scandal and other dossiers currently under scrutiny, and which happened on his watch during the previous administration,” the spokesperson added.

Muscat is under fire by the Opposition after a National Audit Office inquiry confirmed that the government chose to stop court action against CE in order to take back its lease on the Café Premier site, located beneath the Biblioteca in Valletta, at the price of €4.2 million. The money was used by CE to pay back the State some €1.5 million in arrears and bills, and €2.5 million in private bank loans. Controversially, one of the shareholders in Cities Entertainment claimed a €210,000 brokerage fee for landing the deal.

But Muscat has defended his action, in which he appointed a former GPD director, John Sciberras, to act as negotiator with CE shareholder Mario Camilleri, as a way of circumventing the long-drawn court action ahead and to reclaim Café Premier as fast as possible and provide the Biblioteca with a vertical access.

Yesterday Muscat said that Bugeja could have approached him or the parliamentary secretary if the Lands Commissioner had a problem with the deal. “If he really had a problem with it, he should have refused to sign the contract,” Muscat said.

It was the Cabinet secretary that drew up the memo to the Cabinet of Ministers to approve the €4.2 million buy-back.

On Saturday Muscat also said that a number of encroachment agreements signed under the previous administration were under investigation, putting the spotlight on former lands minister Jason Azzopardi who signed extensions on encroachment permits for, among them, newspaper stands to be placed out on pavements.

“I have already challenged the prime minister publicly on last Monday’s Reporter to publish any Lands Department files in connection with the Fekruna expropriation and the Cafe Premier,” Azzopardi told MaltaToday about the compensation to the owner of the derelict Mare d’Oro restaurant, at Fekruna Bay on Xemxija. The compensation was paid out on the eve of the 2013 election, with two large tracts of land in Kappara given to the owner of the restaurant.

“Those negotiations lasted over two years between the Lands Department and the owners of the land, and in which process there was never any involvement by any politician, and concluded for a public purpose. So much so that the present government continued the embellishment of the area made possible only after the expropriation.

“The Lands Dept. file on the Café Premier bailout was concluded in under four months after the elections with the personal involvement of the Prime Minister, even using his personal email account, and including the withdrawal in June 2013 of the court action against the Café Premier owners which had been initiated in 2012, and with the exclusion of all the Lands Dept. officials and the parliamentary secretary for lands.”

Azzopardi said that Muscat should publish all the files of the Mare d’Oro expropriation for a comparison of the transparent process with that of the Café Premier. “The NAO criticised heavily the shroud of secrecy enveloping the Café Premier bailout to the extent that the Lands Dept. architect [today director of the Joint Office] handpicked by the OPM consultant carried out the valuation of Café Premier behind the back of all his superiors, including the Commissioner of Lands, and which valuation could not be traced in the Lands file by the Auditor General.”