The Prime Minister failed to order a review of an irregular development permit issued to Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg, outgoing Ombudsman Joseph Said Pullicino charged yesterday.
“The Ombudsman had reached a decision that the permit was not regular and needs to be corrected. That report cannot be contested.
“As obliged by law, we sent the report to the Prime Minister for action. It was the Prime Minister who stopped it and decided not to act on it,” Dr Said Pullicino said when asked what action his office had taken to see to it that the irregularity is reversed.
“Now it is up to public opinion to come to its own conclusions about why this happened,” he added.
Speaking at the end of a 10-year stint as the country’s second Ombudsman, he said his office’s opinion on the irregular permit issued to Dr Borg still stood and it was up to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to take action.
In a damning report issued last December, the Office of the Ombudsman recommended a review of Dr Borg’s permit for the construction of two dwellings in Santa Katerina, limits of Rabat, after having established that “polices were incorrectly applied” by Mepa.
The Ombudsman’s report also chastised the parliamentary secretary for choosing “a somewhat devious method to file the development application”.
It found that Mepa “had removed the one possible reason (and a very strong one) for refusing the proposal of a similar permit, thereby facilitating the process in the case of Dr Borg’s application”.
“The series of omissions and variations in the text of the development application (of Dr Borg) cannot be put down to human error but point to a deliberate attempt to remove the one remaining obstacle potentially blocking approval of the application,” he concluded.
According to the report, the grave error by Mepa should have been sufficient to review the process and reassess the application.
Rather than implementing the Ombudsman’s recommendation, the Prime Minister had decided to await the conclusions of another inquiry conducted by the Commission against Corruption. The commission eventually endorsed the Ombudsman’s conclusions but said there was no proof of corruption. Asked to comment about the commission’s conclusion, Dr Said Pulicino yesterday said it did not negate the irregularities committed by Mepa.
“It is up to the Prime Minister to see to it that the wrongdoing is remedied. The issue of corruption is different to irregularities in the issue of a permit,” he said.
Dr Borg had brushed off calls to resign, describing the issue as “dead and buried”.
» See also interview with Joseph Said Pullicino on pages 8, 9