This is the story of a large old townhouse in Sta Venera. In the mid-1970s, a frail and elderly man moved out of this house after his wife died as he could no longer live there alone. He went to live with his married daughter. The government immediately slapped a requisition order on the house, which was still full of the old man’s possessions and the family furniture. In those days, the government used the property requisition law, which had been devised in the colonial era as something to be used in times of emergency and only in the national interest, as a means of obtaining property for its friends and acolytes, free of charge. One cannot even call it social housing at the expense of private property owners, because most of those who got the houses were not social cases. They just wanted a nice, free house, and had the kind of friends in government who could get them one. This State-sanctioned theft of private property was a shocking state of affairs, but it happened so rampantly that the shock factor wore off. The slaves, so to speak, became accustomed to their chains. Grateful to be let out into the yard every so often, they soon lost sight of the fact that it is a moral depravity for one man to claim ownership of another. Few risked leaving their houses and flats empty in those days; the government would seize them for its friends.

The old man and his five sons and one daughter – Philip, Tano, Tony, Frank and Alfred Grech and their sister Josephine – fought back by refusing to surrender the keys, something that was of little use other than as a gesture of defiance, though it does put on record the fact that the house was taken from them against their will. The government, which then came close to behaving like an absolute monarch, had no need of the keys to the Grech family home. It got its people to break in through the front door, and to remove everything that was inside, supposedly to some warehouse in an unspecified location. Who knows where those things went… given the much greater loss of the property, the disappearance of the goods and chattels seemed of secondary importance. The house continued to stand empty for a couple of years, which of itself is sufficient proof that it was not requisitioned to meet some national need, and that the law on requisition of property had been abusively applied. One can only assume that no friend-of-a-friend, who was sufficiently deserving of it, could be found to merit the gift of a large family home built in the traditional manner. So the people then in government decided to keep the house for themselves. Had it been requisitioned for use by the State, it would eventually have passed out of their hands as the government changed. So the government gave the house to the Labour Party, there being no separation between government and party in those days, and the Labour Party moved in. The Grech family home became the Sta Venera MLP Club.

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To people who did not live through those years, the attitude of the Grech family might seem hard to believe: they gave up for a time, and waved goodbye to their property as lost for good. You did not argue with the Labour government of the 1970s and the 1980s. If it took your family home just because your father became ill and moved out, then that was that. It was an era of State-sanctioned property theft, but at a time when rights were being trampled on across the board, property rights just went into the mix of generalised abuse. Having lost the building, the Grechs made what turned out to be a crucial error, and accepted for a time the ridiculous annual rent of some Lm70 that the Labour Party decided was fair, arguing that Lm70 a year was better than nothing, given that they had no chance of getting their home back. As things turned out, nothing would in fact have been better than Lm70. When they realised this, they began to refuse the rent, which was deposited in court, as happens in such cases.

The law on the requisition of property leaves no room for redress by the citizen. It was not conceived and enacted by people who would ever have imagined that one day there would be a government which would use it to steal the property of private citizens. Such a situation was beyond contemplation at the time, but within a few decades it had become reality. The Grech brothers and their sister had no legal means of redress: the law, quite horribly, was on the side of those who had taken their house. Then they found themselves with what looked to be a solution. If they couldn’t fight for the return of their house on the grounds that it had been abusively taken from them, then they would fight for the eviction of the tenant, the Malta Labour Party, and then take it from there.

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The law allows for the eviction of tenants in certain cases, if they make major structural alterations to the property without the consent of the landlord, or if they deface the building and substantially change its original lay-out. The Labour Party, confident that the house was in its possession for the rest of time, invested in major structural alterations. The staircase was removed, walls were knocked down, the courtyard was roofed over, the room-plan was dramatically altered, and several lavatories installed. It says a great deal that the Grechs found themselves forced to use the law that regulates the tenant/landlord relationship in a desperate attempt to get their house back. They never asked for the Labour Party to become the tenant of their family home, nor did they want the Labour Party to become the tenant of their family home. There was no contract, they had no agreement; the front door was broken down, the Labour Party moved in, and that was abusively that.

The Grechs filed a suit for eviction of their unwanted, unasked-for tenant, the Labour Party. They won the case in the court of first instance, despite the Labour Party’s disingenuous protests that the alterations were necessary because the house had been damaged by fire in the celebrations after the 1987 election. Fatuously, it claimed that these alterations had “improved the house at no expense to the owners”. In other words, the Grech family had lost their house but should be grateful its unwanted tenant, the Labour Party, for paying for its defacement.

The Labour Party appealed and, tragically for the Grech family, who had already endured so much injustice, the Court of Appeal reversed the decision of the court of first instance. This was just over a year ago. The Labour Party found itself given the green light by the highest court in the land to stay on in the Grech’s former family home, when it has no moral right to do so. The court made reference to the legal doctrine of countries other than Malta, where the seizure of property by the State from private citizens, on any grounds other than that they are convicted drug traffickers, cannot even begin to be contemplated. Yet the fate of the Grechs is effectively that of a convicted drug trafficker: their house has been seized by the State. The main difference is that, unlike a convicted drug trafficker, they remain in nominal ownership of the house when it comes to paying tax on inheritance or transfer of ownership, and that tax will not be calculated on the market value of the house, which is zilch with the Labour Party inside it, but on the book value of the real estate. The State, which seized their house and deprived them of the benefits of ownership, still obliges them to fulfill the burdens of ownership. It is horrendous.

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The Court of Appeal declared that the Grechs had at a certain time accepted rent from the Labour Party, and so must have been aware that their house was being used as a Labour Party club. If the Grechs knew that their house was being used as a political club, the court argued, then they should have expected changes to be made by the tenant so as to adapt the building to use as a club. The tenant, the court declared, had the right to make such changes. It was a breath-taking piece of sophistry. It opens the way to all tenants, even those who are, like the Labour Party in the Grech’s former family home, “tenants” in inverted commas, to do what they like to the building they rent, and the owners are powerless to stop them, if the “tenants” can argue forcefully that they needed to make the changes to suit their purposes. Meanwhile, the court expert, an architect, had filed a report that detailed the extensive changes to this traditional building, and established that it had been defaced, with its original structure completely altered.

Shocked and disgusted, the Grechs have moved for a retrial, on the grounds of miscarriage of justice due to the wrong application of the law. Retrials are permitted only in exceptional cases, and the conditions are highly restricted. A decision as to whether a retrial is to be permitted will be taken by the court on Tuesday. The outcome of that decision, just as with the decision of the court of first instance and its reversal by the Court of Appeal, will be significant not just for the Grech family, but for anyone who has tenants – and for that matter, for the tenants themselves. All those who have had houses seized from their possession by the State, under the cloak-and-dagger guise of the requisition law, will also be waiting for this decision with interest.

If the court decides that the retrial should take place, the prolonged torture of the Grech family in trying to get back their former family home is far from over. They have to go through the retrial process, and once again, the Labour Party might win and they will lose. If the court decides that there is to be no retrial, then the Grechs have lost their house forever. Unlike other tenants who are not political parties or organisations, the Labour Party cannot die. It will stay on in that house for good. Put yourself in the shoes of the Grech family, and imagine how you would feel if your mother were to die, your father were to move out to live with you, and the government then pounced to requisition the house in which you grew up, handing it over to the Nationalist Party for use as a club. It would tear you up inside to drive past your old family house, which had been taken from you, only to see the Nationalist Party club management ripping up the staircase, roofing over the yard, knocking down walls, while hoards of party animals drink beer in your living-room.

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Yes, it truly is horrendous. There is an excellent public relations opportunity in this for the Labour Party, which has tried so hard to distance itself from the horrors of the reign of Patrick Holland, il-Fusellu, Lorry Sant, Dom Mintoff and the rest of the snatch-and-grab gang. With one fell swoop, it can remedy a gross injustice, make amends for the hideous abuse perpetrated by its predecessors, establish its reputation as a respecter of private property rights and of the rights of the citizen, and make us look at Labour in an entirely new light. Alfred Sant can pick up the keys to the Sta Venera Labour Party Club and give those keys back to the rightful owners of the house: the four remaining Grech brothers and their sister. It is all very well to speak about justice; it would be even better were the Labour Party to practise what it preaches, and undo the rank abuse that it perpetrates by continuing to use a stolen house as one of its clubs.