Valletta cafés battle it out over unjust allocation of outdoor table space

The Administrative Review Tribunal has declared null a decision by the Lands Authority to remove a number of outdoor chairs and tables belonging to Valletta’s Café Cordina, and accord them to neighbouring Café Kingsway.

The tribunal sent the case back to the Lands Authority for review.

The case was filed in July 2018 by John Cordina, who argued that the Authority’s decision to amend an encroachment granted to him in Republic Square, for Kingsway to have its own outdoor seating area, was unreasonable, unjust and based on illegal considerations.

Cordina owns the iconic Valletta café in Republic Street, which has been leasing the 805sq.m property from the government since 1946.
The placing of tables and chairs outdoors in Pjazza Regina is regulated by a 2016 policy document on public open spaces.

Cordina has an encroachment of three quarters of the square, with the remaining quarter belonging to Eddie’s Café. But a new café, Kingsway – owned by the former Piccinino store owner Matthew Piccinino – requested its own encroachment from the Lands Authority when it opened last year. So the Authority took some space from both allocations, and gave it to Kingsway.

But before the V18 celebrations in 2018, the owners of Café Cordina spent over €250,000 to upgrade the whole square, passing electricity cables and water pipes underground, as well as installing electricity substations. Cordina was unhappy that his table spaces had been taken away from him and given to a competitor.

He argued that the decision to do so was taken solely to placate the owner of Kingsway, who had already had his request upheld when Cordina protested the decision with the Lands Authority. So Cordina filed an appeal before the Administrative Review Tribunal.

Magistrate Charmaine Galea, presiding the Administrative Review Tribunal, observed that the issue was whether the authority had acted reasonably and justly when it reallocated the existing encroachments.

Cordina insisted that the calculations made by the Authority were wrong and didn’t do justice to the size of his establishment and his legitimate expectations. On its part, the Authority said that the allocations were made on the basis of an objective calculation based on the internal and façade dimensions of every establishment.

The magistrate observed that Café Cordina had nearly 12 times the internal space of Kingsway Café, while its allocated seated encroachment was only five times the size of Kingsway’s own outdoor allocation.

The Tribunal was of the opinion that the Authority’s decision was not reasonable when in its calculations for the number of outdoor covers, it gave a weighting of 40% to the façade sizes of the cafés. “The taking of the façade as a determining factor is not just because the internal space is more relevant when one comes to see how much area to allocate the outside. It is unjust that a shop with four tables inside is given an allocation of a considerable number of tables outside,” the magistrate said.

The Tribunal made it clear, however, that it did not agree that Cordina could vaunt a legitimate expectation based on an encroachment which by its very nature was not perpetual. It was true that Cordina had made a significant outlay to set up electricity and water to his outside tables and had repaved the entire square as a result, but it doesn’t emerge that the Lands Authority had bound itself that the concession would be permanent.

The Tribunal ruled that the appealed decision should be reviewed and invited the authority to carry out an exercise measuring the internal seating area of the establishment and the reallocation of external seating according to the internal seating area. This would create a balance between how many covers an establishment has inside and what could be allocated on the outside, it said.