PN MP Jason Azzopardi – who was the minister responsible for the Lands Department during the previous legislature - has defended a PN government’s stance to award €400,000 in cash for an “8,000-square-metre piece of land”.
The land in question, he said, was “snatched from an entrepreneur by then Labour prime minister Dom Mintoff back in 1974”.
He said that today’s Labour government conveniently hid the size of the land in question and simply stated that a PN government awarded €400,000 to the entrepreneur for a “passageway”.
“The land in question is far from a passageway, as Labour’s media and the government are portraying it to be to make it look as though a PN government awarded an exorbitant sum to this individual,” he said. “The sum awarded to the entrepreneur is reasonable when one takes into consideration that one tumola of land costs around €55,000 these days.” The land in question, said Dr Azzopardi, is eight tumoli in size.
According to MaltaToday, the land in question belonged to entrepreneur Emanuel Peresso, CEO of the Michele Peresso Group of Companies, who received €400,000 cash even though Lands DG Albert Mamo estimated it at just €60,000.
Emails published by the newspaper show that the then-director general of the Lands Department, Albert Mamo, had estimated the land’s value at just €60,000 and emphatically wrote in communication with former minister for lands Jason Azzopardi, that it was inconceivable that higher compensation be given for it.
According to Mamo, Peresso’s land at Mtahleb was outside development zones and therefore its value should be set according to the formulas set out in Chapter 88 as an agricultural piece of land, valued at €60,000.
On 9 October, 2011, Mamo emailed Jason Azzopardi on the Emmanuel Peresso request, who was demanding an amount four times as much as it was worth. Peresso, Mamo says, had bought the land at a much lower price, and that it was then expropriated for road formation.
Contacted by this newsroom to answer to claims made that the land in question was only a ‘passageway’ and whether he felt €400,000 was way too much, Dr Azzopardi said that the land in question was taken away by Mintoff without an expropriation order being issued or any compensation given to Peresso.
Dr Azzopardi said: “Instead of apologising on behalf of the late Labour prime minister Dom Mintoff – who illegally took land away from third parties without an expropriation order and without any compensation given – the government is, in a dirty manner, trying to divert attention from the Old Mint Street expropriation scandal.
“The Labour government of the time’s failure to award the entrepreneur a sum of money in return for the land which was taken away from him in 1974 has led to a PN government having to pay the value of the eight tumoli of land as at 2012 in addition to the interest rate on that sum since 1974 which amounts to almost half of the 400,000 paid,” he said.
Dr Azzopardi also said that what the OPM did not say is the fact that one of the three architects who estimated the land when the expropriation was issued in 2012 is a “neutral arbiter”.
“What Labour did not say either is that the Lands Department made Mr Peresso sign an undertaking that he renounced to any action in any court to be paid more compensation in future. “This is precisely because it was obvious that he would get much more were he to file a court case, as happened in a 2014 ECHR judgement whereby a reservoir was taken away from its owner in 1974”.
Dr Azzopardi reiterated his call for the Office of the Prime Minister to publish the expropriation agreement in full which “clearly states that the land in question consisted of eight tumoli”. He said that the OPM had leaked the story and lied.