The decision to drop legal proceedings against the Labour Party over Australia Hall means the Prime Minister gave his party a property worth €10 million, according to the Nationalists’ deputy leader.
Addressing a news conference in front of the Grade II scheduled building in Pembroke, Beppe Fenech Adami said the PL was already speculating with the property, which includes the stretch of land surrounding it, spread over an area of 6,000 square metres.
Australia Hall, along with two other properties in Pembroke, had been given to the PL in 1979 as compensation for the Government’s requisition of the Freedom Press in Marsa to extend the shipyards.
Dr Fenech Adami pointed out that the agreement had bound the PL to keep all such properties in a good state as, otherwise, the Land Commissioner could terminate the emphyteusis.
He said the property had been neglected for years, especially after 1998 when it was gutted by fire in a suspected arson attack. In 2010, the Land Commissioner had initiated legal proceedings against the PL for failing to maintain the property.
Dr Fenech Adami said that, from the very beginning, the PL had tried to delay proceedings hoping the case would be dropped when there was a change of government.
He accused the Prime Minister of double standards on the issue of party financing.
“On one hand, he advocates the need to legislate to regulate party financing, and on the other he gifts his own party millions of euros out of taxpayers’ money,” he said.
PN spokesman for planning Ryan Callus remarked that whenever Labour was in government it always profited.
He said that, in 1997, the short-lived Labour government had waived €582,343 in rent arrears, which the Land Department had been owed since 1979.
Australia Hall was built in 1915 to serve as a recreational centre for the Australian troops receiving treatment in Malta at the height of World War I.
Following the departure of the British forces in the late 1970s it has seen little action.
In 2005, an application was filed by Lawrence Fino, on behalf of Tamarac Limited, to convert the building into a supermarket.
However, the project never materialised as the application was withdrawn after some time.