It was meant as a clue to how Mepa has been reformed since it passed into the Prime Minister’s hand and acquired a new chairman.

Instead, it has turned out to be a nightmare of self-inflicted damage that has hugely damaged Mepa’s name – even more than the JPO and other messes have done.

No one in his right senses would dare to write a simple statement that would only take five minutes to write anyway, before a crucial meeting that has yet to decide the outcome. But this is what the Mepa bosses did regarding the permit for the Fort Cambridge development, even though they also added a similar statement (yet unseen) in case the permit was not issued (which is hard to believe: what would that statement have said, since the reason for rejecting the application would have to come from the meeting itself?)

And it was even more stupid for the marketing executive to bring this statement with him and leave it lying about while he went to see about seating. Together with my colleague from TMID, I was about 10 minutes late, so I missed the finding of the document, but from the statement by the journalists it would seem the discovery was made by a female journalist and the only female journalist there at the time was PBS journalist Daphne Cassar, not James Debono, who was accused by Peter Gingell at the end of the meeting, of filching the paper from Mr Gingell’s papers.

Having said that, it was ludicrous to claim the statement showed that the issue was cut and dried. Had Mepa chairman Austin Walker said, when the prepared statement was drawn to his attention, that this was a mistake, it would have been made extra clear that the board was totally free to take any decision they wanted to take, much as a judge directs a jury. In a way, Mr Walker said something to this effect but then one has to remember that this Mepa board, like others before it, is a very meek and pacific board.

In the end, after the chairman had let all the NGOs say what they wanted to say (and more and more) and the discussion was given over to board members, only two – Godwin Cassar from the observers and Finance’s Saviour Gauci – mumbled two inaudible questions/comments. And, as many times over the past months or years, the vote in favour was unanimous, not one doubting or dissenting voice. Ma tarax.

There is much to say about this particular application and perhaps it is a bit unfair to dump all responsibility on the new board, when the responsibilities go back much earlier.

In a way, and no one seems to have seen this, the Fort Cambridge application is the price Malta is paying for having made it to the euro. For it was the Lm23 million that government received from the developer that plugged the gap in public finances and which, in the end, enabled Malta to meet the Maastricht criteria. Such a huge commitment on the part of the developer would hardly have been made had there been any reasonable doubt that the application would be approved.

This is what the NGOs keep forgetting: for them it is a question of stopping the development, even at such a late stage, just because something has come up (the caves issue in the area, as in the AD statement the night before, and the intervention by Astrid Vella), or, on surer grounds, because it simply does not make sense to approve such a huge development (and the others around it) before Sliema has a viable traffic plan. (I add more, for the intervention by Dr Sansone went unheeded: there is serious doubt as to whether the plans for water, electricity and drainage in the area have been updated to cope with the applications). Or because it is prudent to have ordered a social impact assessment to be carried out on this and similar applications.

Other valid questions were brought up: the Development Brief outdated the local plan: should it have been amended to fall in line with the local plan? Should more attention and importance be given to the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage and should the superintendence, on the other hand, have left it to the last minute to send a letter (actually until 10 minutes after the meeting began)?

The truth is that last Thursday’s debacle shows how much more needs to be done to reform Mepa. For Mepa is still application-driven and it is this aspect, so to speak, which leads it to so much stress and unclear decisions. Mepa just does not have the time to take the holistic approach: if it gets three or more large-scale applications from one area, it does not stop to see how they will affect the social fabric of the area. To be sure, there is also in this the issue of rights: why can’t I develop my area when Mepa has allowed this neighbour and that one to develop theirs?

A second direct cause of this decision was the Development Brief, to which the public paid but little attention. Once the decision was taken to redevelop the Holiday Inn site, the area was up for development.

Then the former Mepa board blithely agreed, at Outline Development stage, to allow the 16 floors to be changed to 23 floor towers although, to be fair, the 16-floor concept would have used up 65 per cent of the floor space while the 23-floor concept would have allowed more open spaces and used up only 35 per cent of the footprint.

Thus when the 16 June board meeting postponed the decision for the applicants to do something about the height of the 23-storey towers, the applicants hurriedly somehow (it was never explained how and we journalists joked that only people as short as Astrid would have qualified to live there) brought them down to 20 floors but kept the same overall height.

Also, the outline development permit also gave the go-ahead for excavation and most of the complaints from residents – regarding noise, dust, the passage of trucks – have all been overtaken by events, though they are still valid.

It is appreciated that the new chairman gave far more time to objectors and NGOs than did his predecessor – and at the cost of some repetition. The meeting turned rowdy at more than one point, as lawyers yelled at each other and the architect for the development (who is a very valid person) became more and more upset at minor or not so minor points that he saw as distortions. But what was, and is, downright unacceptable was the attitude and the comments of the developer and his people, especially when they rose up in anger and disgust just because Ms Vella claimed that there are three children with leukemia in Qui-si-Sana (what a comment in just this phrase!!!). NGOs have every right to be at such meetings and they are right to raise concerns: Mepa meetings must not become closed meetings between the developers and the board and NGOs must be saved from asinine comments on the part of the developers.

The government and Mr Walker have far more to do to reform Mepa and give it the right public image than they thought they had.