Government paying up for expropriated land

Within the next four years or so, the government should have finished making all outstanding payments to owners of land expropriated in the past to build houses under home ownership schemes, Parliamentary Secretary for Lands Jason Azzopardi said yesterday.

He was speaking outside a housing estate in Għar Barka, in the outskirts of Rabat, where plots were expropriated in the 1980s whose original owners have now all been paid off.

Before that, the occupants of the homes that were built on these plots could still not call their home their own. It meant they were still occupying their homes on the basis of a promise of sale agreement, so they could not take out any loans from the bank.

In the past 18 months, the government has paid close to €5 million to the original landowners at current rates and with interest, allowing some 500 households to gain the long-awaited peace of mind of home ownership.

The plots paid for over this period are in Għar Barka, Burmarrad, Tal-Wej in Mosta, Sta Luċija, Gudja and Għajn Dwieli in Paola.

Paul Scicluna, who lives in Għar Barka, said he had started to feel uneasy knowing that the government had still not paid for the land his house was built on, but now he felt safer.

Dr Azzopardi estimates that it will take another four years to pay for the rest of the plots, affecting 600 households.

In the past 10 years, the government has paid €105 million for expropriations made before 2002, when the decision was made that from then on landowners had to be paid before their land was expropriated.

“Some date back even to 40 years ago,” Dr Azzopardi said. He could not give a precise figure of the amount left outstanding but said it ran into “tens of millions”, with a recent estimate putting it at about €120 million.

He said the Land Department had 160,000 files waiting to be digitised. There was even a dedicated lift to carry them from one floor to the other.

The department has recently started a digitisation process using a new IT system, which will make it much easier for these numbers to be managed.