A large property in Qormi being used as a PL club was rented to the Labour Party for just two years but the party held on to it for a full 60 years and still did not want to let it go, Nationalist MP Ryan Callus said in Parliament this evening.
The club is at the centre of controversy after the owners filed a judicial protest this morning saying the property was being held abusively and calling on the party to vacate it within two weeks.
Mr Callus said that to add insult to injury, before the last general election, Labour leader Joseph Muscat, now prime minister, had promised the landlords to pay them a fair rent from the next due date. The property was being rented for just €189 per year, but with a €130 groundrent, the owners only received €60 a year.
In January 2012 the landlords wrote to Dr Muscat reminding him of his promise. Nothing happened. In April and May 2012 they wrote again asking him to keep his promise and expressing their disappointment.
This correspondence, Mr Callus, showed how the prime minister had been missing deadlines and not keeping his word even before the general election.
Interjecting, Justice Minister Owen Bonnici asked Mr Callus whether the landlords had told him that the Labour Party made an offer to them, but they turned it down.
Mr Callus said Labour only offered to raise the rent by €52.
Dr Bonnici said Labour had been following the mechanism of the law which established the fair price.
Mr Callus asked whether Dr Bonnici was therefore saying that a €252 annual rent for such a site was fair.
POLITICAL PARTIES PROTECTED IN RENT REFORM LAW
Earlier, Tourism Minister Edward Zammit Lewis said that while the PN was complaining about private properties being used as political party clubs, it had done nothing to change the situation when in government.
Indeed, in the 2009 Rent Reform piloted by then minister John Dalli, the political parties were actually given protection in the use of those properties. Therefore the present government should not be lectured now by the Nationalist Party.
The PN had also committed itself to give landlords a fair return, but such changes were only brought about by the present government through a recent legal notice.
Referring to comments by Chris Said (PN) about compensation which he said should be given to the PN for an alleged disadvantage it was suffering through the properties used by the PL, Dr Zammit Lewis said this argument was creative and did not show seriousness. Dr Said had claimed that the PN was being discriminated against in terms of the Constitution, but Dr Zammit Lewis said he could not understand how this resulted in terms of the law.
Perhaps the PN would care to explain how it acquired its clubs in Ta’ Xbiex, Paola and Sta Lucija?
Replying, Mr Callus said the PL had no less than 28 properties which did not belong to it. Twenty-two were government owned and six had private owners. They included the former Raffles Disco, worth €7 million.
Would Labour do the right thing and return the properties to their owners? The PN was always of the view, and remained of the view, that the properties should be returned to their owners. If that did not happen, the PN would insist that it should not be discriminated.
How could Labour MPs speak about party funding and not speak about the former publicly-owned Australia Hall, worth €10 million, which was sold by the Labour Party? It was simply immoral that the Labour government dropped a government court case against the Labour Party and then sold off the property to pay off its debts. So now even the Labour Party’s debts was taghna lkoll. That the PL was claiming it sold the property for €500,000 was also a disgrace. Ordinary people were fined for under-declaring their property values on contracts, but the PL, apparently was above the law. Had a government architect made a valuation?