The Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry expressed its utmost dismay at the planned relocation of the Valletta open air market. The Malta Chamber disagrees that the said market should be relocated to the part of Ordinance St, directly between Pjazza Teatru Rjal and the new Parliament Building.

The country has invested more than €100 million in a world class building that, although still not completed, has already drawn the attention of the international architecture community. The Renzo Piano project has already featured prominently in prestigious publications and is held in extremely high regard in the world’s architecture circles.

The Parliament Building in itself, will add to the country’s national pride for all Maltese as it symbolises an ambitious Malta of the 21st Century.

The Chamber appeals to Government, to protect this investment and safeguard it from the deterioration in value and status which the relocation of an open air market will inevitably bring with it.

The Malta Chamber maintains that if relocated at all, the open air market should be limited to the stretch in Ordinance Street between Republic Street and Embassy of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

At the same time the Malta Chamber strongly deplores the state of affairs at the new entrance to Malta’s capital where a handful of hawkers seem to have been given the sacrosanct right to block Valletta’s new entrance with shabby stalls and kiosks. This is certainly not in line with the image which the Renzo Piano entrance is intended to project. The Malta Chamber therefore urges the authorities to take the necessary steps to immediately remove these stalls and kiosks and to draw up a proper plan for the use of the peripheral area.

As it claimed to a wide consensus in its Economic Vision 2014-2020, the Malta Chamber advocates the abandoning of an ‘everything goes’ mentality once and for all, in favour of a quantum leap of quality also in this regard. Quality is a maxim the country needs to adopt in all areas, and every effort must be done not to undermine this objective.