Sandro Chetcuti, president of the Malta Developers’ Association, does not seem to understand that the underpinning of wise developmental and environmental policies are statistical figures.

At a recent conference he reportedly first fobbed off the figure of 70,000 vacant properties in Malta, which clearly resulted from the 2011 census. He then said: “There are around 55,000 [such vacant] properties..” and then he further brings that down to “half of these as second homes or summer residences”.

Which is which?  Because even the resultant figure of 27,500 so obviously long-vacant and unutilised properties – as resulting from his type of reasoning - is still far too big a figure on a country 17 miles by nine.

Unless, as I have long argued, such, and all other, properties are compulsorily brought into a national cadaster and then taxed for as long as they remain unused, (and, in the meantime, less PA permits being given for bringing structures down and building more monstrosities) then this national problem Chetcuti wants us to “just drop” will remain with us.

There are other figures which simply mean nothing to Chetcuti and his developers. All he keeps on blabbering about is property as an “investment” and the property “market”.

His is totally a businessman’s approach and is oblivious to, or careless about, the considerable social and environment damaging impact his industry is causing in Malta over the medium to long term.

Whatever pretext may be brought up for sustainability having to be based on needs, seen as coming via foreigners who may come to love or work here, such pretexts are very wrongly sourced because the main consequence of such an approach is the complete disdaining of the factual existence of so much long vacant and unutilised property and, in consequence the constant resulting pricing out of thin air simply in terms of foreigners’ ability to buy/rent and the lining of the pockets of the ‘developers’ and not the locals’ incomes.

But all of this the builders do not care two hoots about…