‘Sustainability and honesty’ pillars for PN relationship with developers

Busuttil meets MDA: 'Sustainability and honesty pilllars of our relationship'

Sustainability and honesty will be the two pillars of any relationship a Nationalist government will have with Malta’s lobby of construction developers.

Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said as much in a meeting with the Malta Developers Association, led by president Sandro Chetcuti.

“You recently were quoted telling developers to ‘make hay while the sun shines’… and that damage done is only repaired slowly. To the PN construction is an important sector, so much that in 25 years of administration we changed the island from a Third World country into one with modern infrastructure.

“Mistakes were done but this sector remains important. So it’s on two foundations that we base this importance: sustainability, which the sector must recognise important. Otherwise we would be killing the very country we need for us to live from.”

Busuttil said that it was inconceivable that the Prime Minister selects a 90,000 square metre stretch of land to accommodate a developer he had met privately, referring to Jordanians Sadeen Group and the prospective American University they will be constructing in Marsaskala.

“The second foundation is honesty in governance,” Busuttil said, mentioning again that granting outside development zones to Sadeen was “not on”. “If you don’t have transparency, good governance will suffer.”

While Sandro Chetcuti commented that the MDA was growing dissatisfied with what he said was excessive bureaucracy, Busuttil warned that the forthcoming demerger of MEPA would be shifting power from an independent regulator to politicians. “For us this is a recipe for bad governance.”

Chetcuti on his part said that his comments on ‘making hay while the sun shines’ were in reference to previous efforts by developers at seeing governments enact certain policy changes. “We are annoyed at having to wait for a change in government to see that changes take place,” he said. “Measures such as the first-time buyers’ discount on tax worked and helped us offload the oversupply of building units.”

“We hope that all of us have learnt of the mistakes of the past. We hope that the construction sector does not pass through the same bad times it went through in the last years…

“We want to work with anybody who is elected to government. It should make no difference to us.”