The question posed above may well have been the very same question going through the minds of three Planning Commission members as they chose to simply ignore a court judgment earlier this week and sanction a row of illegally built penthouses associated to Gozitan mega-developer Joseph Portelli.

The permits for the penthouses, situated on two separate blocks of apartments in the Gozitan village of Sannat, were struck down in March 2024 by the Court of Appeal after activists took the legal route to object to the project.

This was after the Planning Authority had approved the permits - despite the planning directorate's case officer recommending that the applications should be refused - and after the Environment and Planning Review Tribunal (EPRT) shot down an appeal and confirmed the permits.

The Court of Appeal however ruled that the permits should never have been granted, saying that both the PA and the EPRT had misinterpreted the Gozo local plan both when it comes to how far the top floor of a development should be setback from the street and that it had also misrepresented planning policy in order to approve the building of two pools in an ODZ area on the site of the development.

The permits for the additional floor of penthouses and the swimming pools within the development were therefore revoked. 

However, because Malta lacked - and still lacks - legislation which stops developers from building when their permit is under appeal, the project was structurally complete by the time the decision had been handed down by the Courts.

Through two third-country nationals, two separate applications were filed to sanction the penthouses as built, while a separate application has been filed to sanction the two ODZ swimming pools.

This is where, you would think, the Planning Authority would step in to enforce the judgment reached by the Court of Appeal - which is a higher authority than a mere Planning Commission.

But alas, the Planning Authority once again proved that it operates not as an authority with the good of the people and the country at its heart, but as a fiefdom for a select few developers to use and abuse of it as they please.

The convoluted reasoning presented in order to justify completely ignoring the court's judgment was to refer to the approval of a sanctioning application for the penthouses in a development across the road.  The fact that this was a sanctioning application implies that even those were built illegally: ergo the Planning Commission gave its blessing to sanctioning more illegalities, because it had previously sanctioned a different illegality.  And so the cycle goes.

It is not lost on anybody that the Planning Commission which handed down this decision is chaired by Elizabeth Ellul, a figure who has already been booted off a different Planning Commission once because of an undeclared conflict of interest because her husband had done work for... you guessed it... Joseph Portelli.

Much has been said about how the controversial planning reform bills are a developer's wishlist and will hand power to the Planning Authority to essentially do as it pleases, even if it means acting above the courts.

Decisions like this really suggest though that these new laws would be only merely formalising the practices already adopted within the Planning Authority.  Because why should people even bother resorting to the courts when the PA can simply choose to ignore them anyway?

But maybe the sense of hopelessness that this question generates is the point of it all.  With no hope, comes no resistance, and with no resistance, developers can continue to do as they please backed by those who should be in a position to stop them.