The San Ġwann council lacked “professionalism” when it bought a 40-year-old villa to use as its office, an inquiry board has found.

The property was purchased 14 years ago and the inquiry was initiated last year after parts of the concrete ceiling came crashing down.

However, the report was only released yesterday by the government despite the inquiry having been concluded in December last year.

The release comes soon after of a separate report that found wrongdoings by the former Labour mayor of Żabbar, Quinton Scerri.

The inquiry board led by former Labour journalist Joe Mifsud, a lawyer, found that the Nationalist mayor of San Ġwann at the time, Helen Fenech, failed to inform council members of the architect’s advice not to buy the property.

Testimony by Etienne Bonello Dupuis, then a member of the council, who had voted against buying the villa, gave a sordid picture of the damp that plagued the garage: “The garage was so humid… if you left a goldfish there it would have lived.”

The inquiry board recommended that the department should lay down written procedures that councils should follow when buying property.

The local council parliamentary secretariat said it would be calling in the San Ġwann council to discuss the report’s recommendations on what to do with the building.