Labour MP cagey about Gaffarena association

One of the owners of the controversial Gaffarena service station in Qormi, and Labour MP Joseph Sammut are directors of an import company – International Tobacco (Malta) Limited – MaltaToday has discovered.

Marco Gaffarena is a shareholder in J Gaff Service Station Ltd, whose petrol pump last month was finally granted a controversial permit by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, after having been forcefully shut down in 2008 and again in 2009 after its owners illegally built new structures on site.

The decision to grant this temporary permit was however not taken by the MEPA Board, on which Sammut sits, but by a subsidiary board.

But the Labour MP was unexpectedly cagey on Saturday when MaltaToday tried to solicit a comment on his business relationship with Marco Gaffarena.

Joe Sammut

Both Sammut and Gaffarena are the directors of an international trading company, International Tobacco Malta, which according to the Labour MP is in liquidation. The shareholders are Gaffarena, Sammut’s wife Sonia Sammut, and International Tobacco plc, in London.

But Sammut sternly refused to explain the company’s functions, and his association with Gafferena, one of his political supporters in the last general elections, as evidence by a photo showing the businessman at a 2013 campaign event together with Labour activist Sandro Chetcuti, the president of the Malta Developers’ Association.

“It’s a professional secret,” Sammut said.

The company was only set up on 23 September, 2013 but no notice of liquidation has been uploaded on the Malta Financial Services Authority’s company register.

When reminded that he was officially listed as a director in company records, Sammut retorted that it was “a personal matter” and that he was “not bound to answer any questions about such matters”.

When MaltaToday quizzed the MP about any other business connections he had with Gaffarena, Sammut replied: “I am a lawyer… I do not speak about my clients.”

Company set-up

International Tobacco (Malta) Ltd has three shareholders: Gaffarena, the Labour MP’s wife Sonia-Catherine Sammut and UK-based International Tobacco PLC, all having a 33.3% share.

The British company, valued at some £5 million, is involved in the manufacture and wholesale of tobacco products, and its directors include Sergio Calleja, Michael Calleja and Adelaide Ellul.

The company’s majority shareholder and managing director, Sergio Calleja, was last year involved in a botched attempt to open a factory manufacturing cigarettes in the northern Italian city of Trieste. The deal fell through after tobacco giant Philip Morris denied their involvement in the project, with plans to open the factory going up in smoke.

Petrol pump permit

Earlier this year, the Gaffarena family was granted a temporary clearance to reopen its petrol station in Qormi against a €500,000 bank guarantee.

In reaction to the controversial permit, Joe Gaffarena, the director of the family business and father to Marco Gaffarena, said that his eight children had suffered “hardship” for five years due the station’s closure. The Gaffarenas not only applied to sanction illegalities on the site of an outside-development-zone (ODZ) petrol station in Qormi, which had already been refused by MEPA in 2011, but also applied to construct a 31-square metre food and beverage outlet, with six car washes on the same site.

Gaffarena was awarded a permit to erect the petrol station in 2007, but subsequent additions were made without permit. In January 2011, MEPA turned down the sanctioning of extension works to Gaffarena’s petrol station because the illegalities on site were resulting in the further intensification of urbanization in an outside development zone.

The illegal works on Luqa Road included the construction of a first floor over and above the height permitted for the petrol station, the increase in the building footprint, the construction of structures near the relocated car wash, an underlying basement and the reduction in size of the underground water reservoir. 

Way back in 2008, MEPA had issued an enforcement notice and sealed off access to the entrance given that Gaffarena had wilfully decided to go beyond the approved planning permission he got in 2006 for the construction of a petrol station.

The former parliamentary secretary for planning, Michael Farrugia, defended the decision, insisting that everyone should be given an opportunity to regularise their position, and that Gaffarena had been “promised a permit before the elections.”
But Nationalist MP and MEPA board member Ryan Callus dismissed Farrugia’s claims, insisting that MEPA had twice turned down Gaffarena’s application under the previous administration.

The Bonello incident

In 2011, an individual who referred to himself as ‘Gaffarena’ assaulted former judge Giovanni Bonello, who had firmly opposed the permit application while serving as a MEPA board member. The former European Court of Human Rights judge said he was attacked in restaurant in a St Julian’s for refusing to vote in favour of lifting the sanctions on Gaffarena’s petrol station.

Joe Gaffarena had denied Bonello’s claims, insisting that neither he not any of his children had ever attacked Bonello.

Daewoo

In the early 1990s, Joe Gaffarena, was involved in a controversy over the location of the  Daewoo car showroom in Mdina Road, Qormi which was originally built without a planning permit, as was its car storage at Hal Farrug.

On the same premises, Gaffarena also had another business, Mixer Ltd, again without the necessary permits. The company was later sold to Bastjan Dalli, brother of former Nationalist minister John Dalli.

Gaffarena later sold his shares in the Daewoo car sales agency to former ambassador Joseph Mary Scicluna. Although Gaffarena’s licence to sell the Korean cars was due to expire and no agreement to renew it was in place, the businessman received several properties, including the Three Rocks Hotel and a large plot of land in Bahrija and the Dacia Car Sales Agency, in addition to a cash payment in return.