Family’s anger at expropriation battle that lasted three decades

30 years have passed since the government’s expropriation of a family’s field in Gharghur used for the construction of a row of townhouses in 1991.

And yet, their fight for rightful compensation – a process fraught with irregularities, delays and legal disputes – has been exasperating.

In October 2021, the Agius family’s request for €2 million in compensation for  2,200sq.m field was trimmed down to just €877,000. But adding insult to injury, the Lands Authority is appealing the decision, insisting the family is only owed €16,500 for what they claim was an agricultural field at the time.

“So many years have passed, so many members of the family have suffered under the weight of not knowing whether they would ever be compensated... the Lands Authority’s appeal is just a slap in the face in a saga of injustice,” said one family member.

When Carmelo And Giuseppa Agius’s field in Gharghur was expropriated by the government in 1992 to be turned into plots for two-storey houses, the Agius family had to wait 23 years before they were even allowed to file for rightful compensation.

From beginning to end, the Agius family contends, the expropriation of their family’s agricultural plot was carried out irregularly by the government of the time.

Well before the President of the Republic issued his declaration of intent to expropriate land – a formal notice in the government gazette – the Housing Authority had started advertising the plots of land for terraced housing in December 1991.

This row of houses on Dun S. Zarb street was formerly a field that was sucked up in the transfer of Church lands to the State in the beginning of the 1990s. Only that it was not Church-owned. The houses were developed by 1992 soon after the plots were taken up by bidders for a Housing Authority home ownership scheme, well before the error became known. The original landowners were only able to apply for compensation in 2016, but the Lands Authority is insisting their compensation is radically trimmed to reflect the value of agricultural land at the time

Instead of finalising the expropriation – by first legally instituting the Lands Authority as the owner of the land, then transferring the land by legal notice to the Housing Authority – the government simply dished out the plots to home ownership scheme bidders.

The President’s ‘intent to expropriate’ was only published in the Gazette on 12 June 1992, well after some 11 bidders had been selected for the home ownership scheme. The Agiuses were left breathless at the speed of the expropriation and development.

But at the time, they were unaware back then that their land – on what is now Dun Salvatore Zarb Street – had been incorrectly marked out by the Maltese Catholic Church as a church land to be transferred to the Joint Office, the entity registering Church lands handover over to the State under the 1993 concordat.

Their field had bordered a Church-owned plot, but it was sucked up in the haphazard transfers of land to the Joint Office. Well after the error was realised, the Gharghur plot had been snatched up for the home ownership scheme, advertised and distributed for development.

The Agiuses were powerless in the face of the expropriation.

Yet they waited, for 26 whole years, for the government to publish the official notice in 2016 announcing they could petition for compensation for the land that had been taken for them.

In 2016 they started legal procedures to request what they insisted was their rightful claim: €970 per square metre – a total of €2 million – citing the updated expropriation rules that set 2005 prices as the base property value.

The Lands Authority refused, claiming this had been agricultural land valued at just €16,400.

So started the Agiuses’ court battle in the Land Arbitration Board. They argued that bidders for the Gharghur plots advertised for Housing Authority were legally obliged to develop the land into terraced houses. Freehold redemptions were registered in January 1992, well before the official presidential declaration for expropriation, and planning applications were filed within that year for development. The land was already shown to be within the limits of the development zone of the Temporary Provision Scheme issued in 1988

The L.A.B. turned down the Lands Authority’s claims that the property was agricultural at the time of expropriation – neither evidence, nor witnesses were presented to substantiate this claim.

But it also disagreed with the Agiuses’ claims for compensation. Instead, the board’s experts halved their claim to €400 per square metre, citing previous L.A.B. decisions – €791,000 for the field and an additional €86,000 for another part of the field which the Lands Authority failed to expropriate.

The Agius remain scorned at the hefty haircut their compensation claim has taken, with three decades of delayed compensation to boot.

“It is a damned system,” a member of the family told MaltaToday. “We suffered expropriation, lack of timely compensation, delayed legal proceedings, and now, the government wants to refuse us the money a court of law has given us. It is hard to trust any administration or the system when citizens are treated this way.”