A former employee of Vassallo Builders sat on the Adjudicating Board of Heritage Malta during consideration of a tender for the construction of a €1.5m Visitors' Centre at St Paul's Catacombs even though his former employer was among the bidders, developer Anġlu Xuereb told a court this morning.
He said that there were two bidders - Vassallo Builders and his own company, AX Holdings - as part of a consortium.
Mr Xuereb was giving evidence in a case where he is asking the court to issue a warrant of prohibitory injunction to stop Heritage Malta from cancelling the tendering process, pending a police investigation.
Last week, Mr Xuereb said that he had received two threatening SMSs which, he believed came from somebody in Heritage Malta and were related to this case.
The SMSs said:
"If you think that paying your way through the stabbing like you always paid your way for anything will set you and Claire free, forget it this time. You did not pay everyone and you made a huge mistake for underestimating technology to save Claire and yourself.
"All you need to do is liquidate all your construction companies, forget about that sector and cancel all public jobsmply and never take a public contract ever ever, the evidence will never surface..."
The SMSs are being investigated by the police.
Taking the witness stand today, Mr Xuereb said that Chris Delia, a former employee of Vassallo Builders, sat on the Heritage Malta adjudicating board for this tender and had also publicly spoken out again AX Holdings, stating that Anglu Xuereb knew nothing about construction and was actually a hotelier.
Replying to questions during cross examination, Mr Xuereb said Vassallo Buildings and AX had submitted bids for the Rabat project. The AX bid was the cheapest but both companies were disqualified for technical issues. AX filed an appeal, which was upheld by the Appeals Board and AX Holdings was reinstated.
Yet they were again disqualified for a technical issue. It was just before AX was disqualified for the second time that he received the threatening SMSs.
Chris Delia was not part of the adjudicating board when AX was disqualified for the second time.
Lawyer Patrick Valentino, who is appearing for Heritage Malta, said this was a rather simple issue, where the court was being asked to stop a wall from falling when the wall had already fallen. Mr Xuereb failed to file an appeal the second time around and the tendering process had been completely cancelled within the time limits established by law.