An attempt by some government sympathisers to blacken the name of Astrid Vella, the pro-environmentalist who has taken a front role in the fight to save the environment and stop easy permits to pull down old period houses, and against the rationalisation scheme, has fallen spectacularly on its back after being confronted with the facts.
The ‘facts’ as leaked to this paper, claimed that:
• Ms Vella, for all her opposition to the demolition of a baroque house, which she claimed was the oldest house built in Sliema, is herself living in a block of flats that has taken the place of another old house which had been pulled down.
• That Ms Vella is a shareholder and a director of a company, BMC Developments, which includes among its memorandum and articles the development of property, as its name also implies.
Confronted with these ‘facts’, Ms Vella said that she must have been four years old when the old house was pulled down by her great aunt’s husband. She was eight when her family moved into the newly-built apartment building.
As regards BMC, Ms Vella said she had inherited this directorship from her old relatives.
The last time this company had done any construction was in 1969, before the death of her father and her great aunt’s husband. Since then, the company has been seeing to just the cleaning of the communal areas and normal maintenance of the apartment block.
Ms Vella condemned the attempt to blacken her name: “This has been pulled out of the dirty tricks bag,” she claimed, targeting her for her part in recent pro-environment protests, including the one last Wednesday at which she spoke.
“Since our forefathers were generally prolific,” she added, does that mean that all the 120 or so descendants of her great aunt’s husband cannot open their mouths because they are all “descended from property developers?”
Besides, in many cases, people in the 1970s found the only way for them was to develop their property since the rent laws, then and now, made all maintenance costly.
And, just in case anyone unearthed something else about her, Ms Vella declared she and her husband are the owners of a 375-year-old farmhouse in an area where property is allowed to go up to six storeys high and a penthouse. However, she and her husband have decided on principle to renovate the property and retain it as the old farmhouse it is.
Ms Vella told this newspaper: “This concerted campaign to discredit me with letters in the newspapers just proves how scared the government is of this movement that one small woman has unleashed. If they were in the right, as they claim, they would not be running so scared as they are.”