Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/618165
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 20 DECEMBER 2015 29 Opinion Opinion lions, tigers, leopards and jackals. It's not just Malta's planning laws that were fed to the animals at that zoo… it was also all the treaties and conventions Malta ever signed for the protection of endangered species worldwide. It would take something truly imaginative to top that as an infringement, I'd say. Something epic, in fact. And just when I thought we had an undisputed winner in the category of 'Most Blatant Disregard for All Known Rules and Regulations'… well, what do you know? Not only does a new contender enter the ring… but it just happens to be the Government of Malta, too. You know, the one that actually writes all the rules and regulations that get to be enforced on everyone else, when their illegalities are too small and petty… Let's watch this Olympic achievement again in slow motion, shall we? It started with a plan to build a university on ODZ land… and already we are beyond the parameters of what is actually legal, though the project itself is still at conceptual stage. But wait, it gets bigger. Once it was pointed out that the 'American University of Malta' project, as proposed, would violate the Structure Plans… the same plans the Labour Party defended, at the time when infringements were proposed by the Nationalists… out pops a newly revised version of the Structure Plan, in which the only discernible difference concerns 'exceptions' to enable the government to simply sidestep planning laws at will. (All in the "national interest", of course…) These new regulations may or may not have been hurried through in time to facilitate the project – though the timing was sure convenient – but the even more troubling problem is another. They will apply to all future development projects, too. So not only is this a gargantuan perversion of the entire planning process in its own right – it renders the same planning process entirely redundant. What good is a set of regulations that can simply be by-passed for this or that project… depending how 'big' the project is? Ah… we're back to our national preoccupation with size. For this is the other way in which the government has outgrown the most heinous planning crimes. It has now written it into the law, that the applicability of regulations depends exclusively on the size of the investment. If it's big enough to guarantee so many jobs and so much in cash… we'll just tear up the statute book for as long as it takes to get the project done. For everything else, they apply. Honestly. May as well put up a big 'For Sale' sign on the Constitution while we're at it… All this, by the way, before we even get to the part where the land in question was actually transferred to the Sadeen Group. Here, a small proviso may be necessary: I have lost count of the number of comments criticising the transfer itself (as opposed to how it was done), for all the world as though this were somehow the crux of the entire matter. But it isn't. The government is within its rights to lease out land on a temporary emphyteusis. It does this all the time: MIDI took out a 99-year lease on Tigne and Manoel Island. Ditto for SmartCity, etc. Leaving aside the small matter that two-thirds of the land in this case is supposedly 'protected' (and therefore should not be touched at all)… the problem here is not so much that the land was leased; but that the most basic rules of good governance were simply ignored altogether throughout the process. The government is bound by laws (which, again, it used to cite all the time in Opposition) specifying that any public deed of significant value should be put to a public call for tenders. The process was inexplicably waived in this instance: the government just went ahead and chose the Sadeen group, which… regrettably… does not seem to have even the most basic accreditation to open something called a 'university' in the first place. Clearly, you cannot argue that this company was chosen for its academic credentials. On the contrary, it seems that the entire selection process was dismantled, specifically because the government did not want to be faced with a choice. This was a 'fait accompli', if ever I saw one in this country… and it might just constitute the single largest example of its kind we've ever seen. What does all this actually tell us about the administration of justice in Malta in 2015? I know what it tells me. If you want to break planning or governance laws in Malta, and get away with it… do it big time. Don't waste your time with petty infringements. Go straight for the serious felonies, and perpetrate them as blatantly and as massively as possible. After all, size matters. In fact, it may well be the only thing that still does… Educational institution with panoramic sea views: Zonqor Point, site for the American University of Malta