The Lands Authority cannot ignore, set aside, or discredit the two assessments made by Grant Thornton and the Auditor General regarding the Fortina agreement, Nationalist Party MP Ryan Callus said in parliament on Tuesday.

Callus was speaking about a Fortina Group statement, in which he said it was stated that the committee in some way discredited the two aforementioned assessments.

Callus said the statement by Fortina in question was a "blatant lie which cannot be ignored", and continued that during the committee meeting on Monday, a proposal was made by the government to include a text in the parliamentary resolution which would cast doubt on the valuation prepared by the NAO. He said that the Opposition strongly opposed this text, and requested that it be removed from the resolution, "and it was after this was removed that the Opposition agreed that the case should go back to the Lands Authority".

Callus added that the Opposition also did not agree that the company should benefit from a lower valuation due to a methodology which may have been put into effect recently.

The PN MP said that if there is anyone who has always been against what he described as a "major scandal that robbed our country of millions of euros", then it was the Opposition through strict oversight in the governance board and with a consistent vote in parliament committees.

He concluded by reiterating the PN's full confidence in the investigation and the report made by the NAO, and added that the Opposition will continue to be on the side of the people until it is ensured that what was "stolen" from them is returned in full.

A report by the Auditor General last month revealed that a valuation prepared by auditors Grant Thornton, placing the land's worth at €18 million, had been suppressed by Lino Farrugia Sacco, the former chair of the Lands Authority's board of governors. Earlier valuations produced by the Lands Authority's architects had placed the land's value at €8.1 million and another draft at €12.1 million. Meanwhile, an independent valuation commissioned by the Auditor General during his investigation put the figure at €21 million. Fortina ultimately paid €8.1 million for the waiver.

Malta's parliamentary Audit Committee ruled on Monday that previous assessments were either incomplete or inconsistent with the authority's legal framework, and said that the Lands Authority will have to undertake a fresh valuation of the Fortina waiver.