An eight-storey high building in Old Bakery Street, Valletta, will be inspected by planning authority enforcement officers to ensure permit conditions are respected.

Commissioned by the government, the €1.8 million project, which involves joining two adjacent old buildings and raising it to eight floors to house chambers for the judiciary, had been recommended for refusal.

The building’s façade must remain untouched but the new floors, constructed with freshly-cut limestone blocks, built on the roof stick out like a sore thumb, towering over the neighbouring buildings.

Photos of the building, which also has an entrance from Strait Street, went viral on social networking sites as people questioned the Malta Environment and Planning Authority’s decision to approve the development.

Although Valletta is a Unesco World Heritage Site, there are no planning policies setting a height limitation for buildings there, according to a planning authority spokesman.

The project had originally been recommended for refusal by the planning directorate when the first application was filed in 2001, he added.

At the time, the directorate had also disagreed with plans to build a bridge to connect the new chambers with the law courts.

“The proposed bridge is unacceptable and the building will not maintain the visual integrity of the area,” the directorate had said in its report. Instead, the directorate suggested that, if the permit was granted, the additional floors should reflect the recessed floors allowed in a permit – unrelated to the government project – granted to an adjacent building. In this permit, the developer was allowed to build the fourth floor in line with the building in Old Bakery Street while the fifth floor had to be recessed by 5.3 metres and the sixth floor by 4.2 metres.

Almost nine years ago, the application to build the new chambers had been refused by the Development Control Commission. Two months later, the developer filed for a reconsideration of the refusal.

The planning directorate once again processed the request and concluded that the “application should be refused for the same reasons it gave in the original decision”, the spokesman said. It reiterated that the building alignment of the chambers did not follow the design of the nearby building.

When the case reappeared before the Development Control Commission in February 2007, it asked the architect to submit fresh plans – eliminating the bridge – which had to be approved by a sanitary officer. One month later, the new plans, without the bridge, were submitted and approved by the sanitary authorities.

The permit was approved by the commission in June 2007, overturning the directorate’s recommendation, the spokesman said. The work site, which was officially visited by newly-appointed Justice Minister Chris Said on Wednesday, will house the private chambers of the members of the judiciary and other offices.Work started in March last year and will be completed by the end of this year.