Bernard Grech had regularised changes to his Mosta villa in 2019

Bernard Grech had applied to sanction several changes to his Mosta villa carried out without a planning permit in 2019.

The regularisation was approved by the Planning Authority in March of 2019, a year-and-a-half before being elected Nationalist Party leader.

The property, Amber Ville, is located within a residential area and is fully within development zones.

The application foresaw the sanctioning of a pump room at basement level and of PV panels at roof level as well as minor alterations to the position of walls at ground floor and first floor level and changes made to the staircases and the design of the façade and the front garden. 

The permit was approved through the summary procedure, a fast-tracked permitting system introduced by the Labour government in 2016 for extensions or alterations of existing residential buildings which are not located in urban conservation areas or in the ODZ and which conform to the height limitations decreed in local plans.

It was Robert Abela who referred to Grech’s sanctioning application when answering questions by journalists on his acquisition of a 2,200sq.m estate named ‘Ċinja’, just three months after it was regularised by the Planning Authority.

Abela was at the time the chief lawyer to the Planning Authority. The permit included no involvement of the PA’s legal office.

The illegal extensions carried out before 1994 had doubled the size of the farmhouse to 352sq.m.

Abela has denied interfering in the Planning Authority’s decision to regularise the Żejtun villa.