Fast-track €1.65 million expropriation for Labour MP’s business associate

A Labour MP’s business associate, Mark Gaffarena, made a killing of €685,000 in profits in just two months thanks to a fast-track expropriation of his Valletta property by the Labour administration.

The Sunday Times revealed that the government property division (GPD) paid Gaffarena €1.65 million in land and cash for half-ownership of an Old Mint Street, Valletta property that he had bought for a fraction just eight weeks earlier.

The property houses a school and the government offices used by the Building Industry Consultative Council.

Gaffarena bought a quarter of the property for €23,294 back in December 2007. In January 2015, this part of the property was expropriated and Gaffarena was paid €822,500 in land and cash. But in February 2015 he purchased another quarter of the property for €139,762, and then this was expropriated in April for compensation of €822,500 in land and cash.

In total Gaffarena was paid €516,390 in cash, land measuring 1,663 square metres at White Rocks valued at €70,000, as well as adjacent land measuring 3,735 square metres, valued at €260,000; land measuring 24,073 square metres and another measuring 2,150 square metres in Zebbug, together valued at €375,000; a €65,000 property on Manwel Dimech Street, Sliema; land at Ta’ Kandja measuring 5,992 square metres valued at €165,800 and 9,980 square metres at land at Handaq valued at €192,810.

A government spokesman said the GPD purchased the property after the owner “offered to sell his share to government” and that the government was now in a better position to stop a possible eviction.

But at the time of the first expropriation in January 2014, Gaffarena only owned a quarter of the property. He bought another quarter which he sold once again to the government.

Gaffarena is one of the owners of a controversial petrol pump, the J Gaff petrol station in Qormi, which is fraught with illegalities.

Company recordss consulted by MaltaToday show that his business associate happens to be Labour MP Joseph Sammut, the party-appointed member on the board of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority: both are directors of an import company – International Tobacco (Malta) Limited.

The shareholders are Gaffarena, Sammut’s wife Sonia Sammut, and International Tobacco plc, in London. The British plc, 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.

Qormi petrol pump controversy

Gaffarena is a shareholder in J Gaff Service Station Ltd, whose petrol pump in 2014 was finally granted a controversial permit by MEPA 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 not taken by the MEPA Board, on which Sammut sits, but by a subsidiary board.

Proprietor Johann Gaffarena has not only applied to sanction illegalities on the site of an outside-development-zone (ODZ) petrol station in Qormi, which had been refused by MEPA in 2011, but has now applied to construct a 31-square metre food and beverage outlet, with six car washes on the same site.

The illegal works at the petrol station on Luqa Road, Qormi, included the construction of a first floor over and above the height permitted for the petrol station.  In January 2011 the MEPA board turned down the sanctioning of extension works, because the illegalities had resulted in the further intensification of urbanisation outside the development zone.

On that occasion, both Nationalist and Labour representatives on the MEPA board voted in favour of sanctioning the illegal extension of the J Gaff petrol station, but were easily outvoted by then chairman Austin Walker and seven other board members.

Labour MP Roderick Galdes – who represented the Opposition on the MEPA board – had then insisted that board members take in consideration the location of the development and “the improvements to the infrastructure and the investment made”.

His vote contrasted with the Labour media’s relentless reports on the issue: it was Labour weekly KullHadd that revealed, in October 2009, that Enemalta had supplied the petrol station with electricity, despite the lack of a compliance certificate.