If ever proof was needed to show how the Labour media can turn a victory into defeat all by itself, that was shown by the spin ahead of Thursday’s meeting of the Mepa board.

For hours before the meeting, the Labour media had fulminated against the application for the regeneration of the disused Lowenbrau factory outside Qormi. For Labour, as we all know, to mention Zaren Vassallo is like waving a red flag to a bull. Out come the epithets, the tarnishing, the blame by association. Since he is an inside friend of the Nationalist Party, takes party officials on cruises on his boat, employs a PN MP, built the PN headquarters, contributes lavishly at PN dos – then he can do nothing that is not tainted, corrupt, get anything except through cronyism.

So the PL spin before the meeting was enormous – statements, guilt by association, claims he was already breaking the law, that Mepa came in from its holidays just to get his application passed. Anything and everything that could be said was indeed said.

The Qormi mayor turned up together with her experts. One News sent a journalist and a cameraman who filmed practically the entire meeting. In the context of an ordinary meeting, that is quite intimidating, especially when the One News reporter, micro in hand, intervened to ask the same questions just put by the mayor and demanded to know what was Mepa going to do about these allegations of illegalities.

Mepa chairman Austin Walker quite rightly put an end to this. He showed he had no intention of turning the Mepa board meetings into a television programme and that the focus of the meeting was the application and any eventual illegalities were to be tackled by the appropriate Mepa offices.

The funny thing is that, apart from this overt political barracking, the criticism voiced about the application was more than justified.

First of all, this must be the only case, not just in Malta but also in many other countries, where one finds a supermarket backed rear to rear by another one. Now one cannot really see what Mepa can do about that: once an application comes in, Mepa has to judge it by its own parameters and if an entrepreneur decides on something that by all appearances is risky or foolhardy, then that’s up to him. There was, to be sure, some mention of a nebulous Retail Impact Assessment at the meeting but it did not stop, for instance Pavi from opening up a big supermarket on the outskirts of Qormi to the detriment of many Qormi shops. It did stop Lidl from opening up in Xewkija, but it does not seem to have stopped the huge Daniel’s from opening up in Hamrun. Etc.

Secondly, the traffic issue. The Qormi local council Perit argued that the situation is already very congested at the Four Saints roundabout and pointed out that there are other applications waiting for Mepa processing. The usual Mepa answer to that is that Mepa processes each application on its own merit, but that’s what’s wrong: Mepa never considers things holistically.

Roderick Galdes, who sits on the Mepa board and was vociferous in his arguments (to the point where he and Joe Falzon got involved in a prolonged across-the-table argument, and who was Qormi mayor when the Pavi application was approved, described how impossible it has become to get round the roundabout in the morning.

At the end, as we know, the application was approved and suggestions made even by people on the board who later voted for the application were left by the wayside. There were other cases, such as an office block on the outskirts of Mosta, where the developer was made to pay for a junction improvement. All there was on Thursday was vague talk about how Transport Malta should redesign the roundabout but not who is going to do anything about it.

Apart from the traffic viability issue, an  even bigger one is that regarding parking. Just some years ago, the area was reserved for horse cages and cars belonging to the factories’ employees. All that has now changed: Arriva came and took over most of the horse cage area, and racecourses every weekend fill the entire area with cars parked haphazardly.

Now all that cannot be hinged on one particular application, and Mr Vassallo increased the parking to be offered from 194 to 310 even though TM had accepted the 194 figure. There is some truth in the argument that one cannot expect all the new complex operations to be at full blast at all hours, when the food preparation complex workers begin work at 4am and the function rooms would be in use on weekends and after hours. But how can one really expect two function rooms to entertain some 450 people who cram 10 to one car, when most weddings usually attract around a thousand guests?

So now we will have cars parked among the trees and a suggestion to create a sort of double-decker car-parking system was not acted upon. So too, strangely, a proposal, first mooted by the Mepa chairman and later by Mr Vassallo himself, to prolong the discussion by a month or so for improvements to be suggested.

When the vote came, three voted against, and seven in favour. There were, at least, two members who did not attend. Maybe the seven were always going to vote in favour but maybe too, just maybe, some of them were put off by the antics of the PL media and the politicizing of the issue.