Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1544245
12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 5 APRIL 2026 FEATURE He faked Joseph Portelli GEORGE Muscat kept calling. Not once, not twice, multiple times, ringing an Instagram account he was convinced be- longed to Joseph Portelli. The Nationalist Party election can- didate was desperate to get through. But on the other end, a man in the Netherlands stared at his phone and said nothing. He could not believe a bud- ding politician had fallen for his satirical Instagram account impersonating property impre- sario Joseph Portelli. Patrick Van Schaik is the man behind the concreteologist, the satirical Instagram account im- personating the developer be- hind Mercury Towers, Ħamrun Spartans, and what feels like roughly half the construction cranes currently taking over the Maltese skyline. The account ran for nearly two years before Van Schaik came clean on April Fool's Day 2026 to reveal how people fell for his satirical provocations, including some renown names. When he isn't impersonating Portelli, Patrick Van Schaik is known for highlighting unsung modern buildings in Malta on his Instagram page Limestone- jungle. The bio, he insists, made it perfectly clear it was satire. He had listed the fictional Portel- li as having a PhD in devel- opment, plainly noted it, and believed that would suffice. However, it was not enough for George Muscat, who never re- vealed in his messages what he truly wanted, only that he was calling repeatedly and that he had introduced himself in one message as a friend of Nation- alist Party leader Alex Borg. How it started Van Schaik had actually start- ed with a different account, one associated with the Buġib- ba Temple, the prehistoric site enclosed within what used to be the Dolmen Hotel. He used the account to complain dai- ly about having a hotel built around it and about why no- body had created a proper her- itage space for it. He moved on from the ac- count until he found out about Joseph Portelli, who, at the time, had no Instagram pres- ence of his own and was the ob- vious candidate. "I realised that Joseph Portelli doesn't have an account," Van Schaik told MaltaToday from the Nether- lands. "And I was interested in creating some sort of satirical account similar to Bis-Serjeta." Someone on Reddit called Portelli an expert penalty taker, referencing his president/play- er role with Nadur Youngsters before taking over Ħamrun Spartans. It was a detail Van Schaik was unaware of at the time. He coined the term 'Con- creteologist' himself, a pun on his main account, Limestone Jungle, which is a play on the phrase 'concrete jungle'. He added a humorous bio to the profile, awarded the fictional developer a PhD, and began following various users. The methodology The approach was method- ical. He looked up every MP, local councillor, and mayor on Wikipedia and followed the lot, not particularly caring which party they belonged to. He added influencers; "stupid influencers that only focus on themselves,", as he put it. He added journalists and media personalities. He followed any- one with whom he shared mu- tual connections, knowing the algorithm would recommend the account to users on that basis, and within months had over a thousand followers. When private accounts, in- cluding, those belonging to politicians' wives, accepted his follow request, he realised the scale of what was happening. "That sort of blew my mind," he said, "because I thought it was very obvious that it was satire." Churches, cranes, and Chris Cardona Van Schaik says he deliber- ately avoided anything racist or anything that would make Portelli look genuinely terrible, sticking to posts that were fun- ny but plausible—the kind of thing you could almost imagine a developer saying. One post suggested that since Malta has 365 churches, some of them could reasonably be converted into apartment buildings, as happens in other countries. Another celebrated the demolition of a Richard England building in St Paul's Bay, where Portelli was behind the new development. The message prompted Raymond Tabone, a St Paul's Bay coun- cillor who was at the time seek- ing re-election, to send a pri- vate message agreeing that the building was very ugly and that he was glad to see it go. Van Schaik decided then and there that he would not be go- ing into conversations with people. "I don't want to mislead anyone," he said. The Concreteologist also commented prolifically on posts by pages of local news portals, leaving cheerful, pro-development remarks un- der articles about approved buildings while the actual com- menters below mourned their neighbourhoods. Former minister Chris Cardo- na replied to one post, agreeing with a quote Van Schaik had lifted from a Planning Authori- ty official who had said Malta is more beautiful now than it was 10 years ago. "I don't agree with this," Van Schaik said. "I think Malta looks terrible now com- pared to 10 years ago." But the Concreteologist agreed, and Cardona agreed with the Con- creteologist, and that was that. He said he even received mes- sages to the account from jour- nalists asking where he could find a property listing that said no Maltese allowed. It was a fake advert Van Schaik had posted as a joke about a Mer- cury Tower apartment, on the same day that a real discrimi- natory rental listing along sim- JULIANA ZAMMIT jzammit@mediatoday.com.mt