Minister Cristina takes political responsibility for White Rocks project

The political responsibility for the negotiations on the White Rocks complex has been taken over by Education and Sports Minister Dolores Cristina, whose Parliamentary Secretary Clyde Puli is leading the negotiations with the proposed developers.

In answer to supplementary parliamentary questions by the Labour opposition on the project, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech said some of the organisations currently located in the area were government departments.

He disagreed with opposition finance spokesman Charles Mangion’s question why it should be Minister Cristina when the project was mostly about some 300 apartments. Minister Fenech said that even though the project involved government land, it was mostly about sports and the residential part and the proposed hotel constituted only a small percentage of the whole project.

This meant he was not misleading the House, as Dr Mangion had suggested.

Any decision about such public land use would eventually have to come before the House. All sports associations involved in the current talks, which were the widest possible, were convinced of the project’s sports connection.

Mr Fenech said it would be a pity if the opposition decided to belittle the project because it would incorporate sports facilities that were unprecedented in the Maltese islands.

Asked by Opposition Leader Joseph Muscat what the land parcel was worth, Minister Fenech said this was part of the ongoing negotiations and would eventually be made public.