Café Premier ‘committee’ seeks public’s ideas, PN says Muscat ‘caught in a lie’

The public is being invited to submit its ideas to a new working committee on how best to utilise the site of the former Café Premier, whose former tenants were “amicably” expropriated from the public space by the government in a controversial €4.2 million settlement.

The reacquisition by the government of the Café Premier lease was the subject of a damning inquiry by the Auditor General, which questioned the direct involvement of the Office of the Prime Minister in negotiating a ‘bailout’ for the operators of the loss-making Café Premier, when they could have been evicted by the Lands Department.

The government had claimed that the space was necessary to free the overlying National Library on Pjazza Regina from any dangers associated with the operations of the restaurant, and to install an elevator at the ground level.

Now it has appointed a working committee to study how best this psace could be utilised.

The sub-committee will be chaired by conservation specialist Dr Ray Bondin, and will comprise of Joseph Caruana, Albert Marshall, Herald Bonnici, MTA chairman Gavin Gulia, Joanne Sciberras and Dr Tony Pace.

The committee will evaluate ideas from the public for the best use of the building, carry out consultations with entities interested in the sue of the site, and see how best to create access to the Biblioteca, while also giving recommendations on how best to use the site without excluding any commercial activity.

The recommendations will be presented to the head of the civil service, Mario Cutajar. 

The public can offer its views by email on [email protected] by not later than 6 May 2015.

In a reaction, the Nationalist Party said the government had been caught in a lie, admitting to acquiring the expensive lease without even having had an idea what to do with the building. "We were right to describe the payment of €4.2 million a scandal with the direct and personal intervention of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat," the PN said.

"A serious government would have first conducted the necessary studies before paying €4.2 million to a bankrupt company. The fact that the government took nearly a year and a half to start evaluating what to do with the building confirmed that the Prime Minister paid the money because he had held secret talks with the owner."

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat had in fact said that the money had been paid because the building was needed for a cultural project in connection with Valletta 2018, and to offer vertical access to the overlying Biblioteca. "The government statement today made it clear that that declaration had been a lie," the PN said.

Originally, the report by the National Audit Office, requested by the Opposition, was spurred on by MaltaToday’s first report back in February 2014 when it broke the story that the Government Property Department (GPD) had withdrawn legal action for the rescission of the Café Premier lease to operators Cities Entertainment, which had fallen back on some €250,000 in ground rent owed to the GPD.

Instead, the Office of the Prime Minister welcomed a suggestion by Cities Entertainment shareholder Mario Camilleri to negotiate with architect John Sciberras, a former GPD director, on a settlement for the rescission of the lease.

The €4.2 million essentially was used to pay the State back on outstanding rents, energy bills, VAT and tax, as well as Cities Entertainment’s private Banif Bank loans of €2 million and a €210,000 fee to shareholder Mario Camilleri for actually brokering the deal with John Sciberras.

But the NAO found a “lack of rigorous and documented consideration of other options” such as the legally justified rescission of the lease; “poor governance” with the Prime Minister’s negotiating team failing to involve the GPD from the initial stages of negotiations; an absence of documentation to sustain government claims that there was a danger to the overlying National Library by gas cylinders in the café; and that a 5% commission for CE’s shareholder was “unsubstantiated and… inappropriately included in the agreement.”