Former Lands Minister Jason Azzopardi and the former Director General of Lands, Iman Schembri, will face off in a special meeting of the Public Accounts Committee, after Dr Azzopardi insisted on Tuesday that Mr Schembri was lying when he said that, during his tenure as minister, he had met with representatives of 82 Limited to discuss the sale of 83, Spinola Road, a property whose transfer was subject to a National Audit Office report.

READ: Property Department never informed me of Spinola deal problems - Azzopardi

Earlier this month, Dr Azzopardi in a sworn deposition before the Public Accounts Committee said that the department had failed to inform him about a court sentence handed down regarding the foreshore at 83, Spinola Road, or that the government was expected to gain only €35 – since revised upwards - from the sale of the property.

A report released by the National Audit Office last July found irregularities in the deal, with circumstances the auditor-general’s office said were “injudicious.”

 "When one considers that the property was transferred for €525,000 against the NAO's valuation of €2,400,000, the value for money was certainly not ascertained,” the report stated.

During an unusually acrimonious session of the PAC on Tuesday, Dr Azzopardi insisted that there had been only a single meeting on the topic in question for which he had been present, and third parties had been excluded. He also said that he had not, at the time, known that the company was pushing for the case to be concluded quickly and for another tendering process to be avoided.

In what was intended to be the concluding session of the debate on the transfer of land at 83, Spinola Road, Dr Azzopardi also insisted that Dr Schembri had never drawn attention to the pending court sentence on the land or to the fact that the Church would receive most of the proceeds gained from the land’s outright sale.

It was not reasonable to expect ministers to read the contents of files numbering in the hundreds of pages, when dozens of such files were referred to them each week, he said.

Dr Azzopardi also criticised the government for “giving away” land with an even greater value than the land under discussion. He said the current proprietors of 83, Spinola Road had last year been granted planning permission to add additional storeys to the extant shell, despite the fact that Mr Schembri had clearly stated that the land transfer in question had not included the transfer of airspace.

The additions would impinge upon the airspace above and adjacent to 83, Spinola Road.

However, Government MP Robert Abela said that planning permission was always issued without regard to third-party rights, and, without a title on the land for which permission had been granted, it would remain unactionable.

Dr Abela and the other government MPs on the PAC criticised Dr Azzopardi for not giving a full and detailed breakdown of the implications of outright sale, and for assuming, since nothing was indicated to the contrary, that the proceeds in their entirety would go towards the public purse.

Furthermore, in light of the fact that the original recommendation by the Lands Department had been to go for temporary emphyteusis, a recommendation which had subsequently been changed by the same department following the meeting held with the minister on the topic, Dr Abela  asked why Dr Azzopardi had not asked why this had happened. He pointed out that the change of this decision immediately following the meeting in question had led the Auditor General to suspect “ministerial involvement.”

Dr Azzopardi replied that, it was reasonable to conclude in such cases that, unless the contrary were indicated, the proceeds would wholly benefit the government.

He said he felt “betrayed” that he had not been informed of the full details of the case. To this end, he said that, with only the same “partial and incorrect” information in hand, he would make the same decision again. However, he was not troubled by the fact that the proceeds had gone to a good cause, and he said that he would rather be criticised for not overstepping his boundaries than for overstepping them.