Last week The Economist ran a back page ‘for sale’ advert of a château in Normandy, France. The photos showed the 18th century French château in the heart of Calvados, the place where they make that alcoholic apple brandy that you can add to coffee.

“It is set within 12 acres of walled parkland,” ran the ad, which is more or less the size of six football pitches. The house comes with “well-manicured lawns, flower gardens, tennis court and woods”. Woods. Fancy that. Waking up in the morning and going for an early jog in your own woods and then you go back and while you’re sipping coffee (with calvados) you’ll discuss the number of deer you spotted.

Anyway, this historical château, only half an hour away from the beautiful sprawling beaches of Normandy, has nine bedrooms and three living rooms, with listed hand-painted wall murals. It has extra little buildings such as a three-bedroom cottage. Also, the 12 acres are surrounded by fields, so there are no over­looking neighbours.

The château is selling for €1.9 million, which is a lot given that, err, it cannot be knocked down and turned into a 38-storey block of apartments and a 17-storey hotel. You get what you see and you have to keep it that way – it’s land that cannot be developed into a multi-million gold pot.

Now, if you had the money to spend would you buy this château or would you, say, rather fork out double the amount to buy a flat in Pembroke in a block of 98 other flats?

Sorry! I called it ‘flat’. It’s a millionaire’s apartment, in a 38-story block, next to a 17-storey hotel, with a choice of one, two or three- bedroom apartments for €3.5 million or more.

It seems that if you can cough up at least €7 million you can buy a whole floor, all of which, we were assured, would have double glazed windows. Sure, there won’t be views of a Normandy beach, but on one side you’ll have the open sea and St George’s artificial beach and on the other, a view of the miserable Pembroke residents going about their lives in the shadow of a gigantic structure imposed on their lives.

This millionaire’s tower won’t attract people who have extra money to dish out but people with money they desperately need to hide: money launderers

Why would you pay at the very least double the amount of the cost of a French château, to live in this block? Because the people living on top of you and under you will be special: “The super-rich, the people who fly to and from Malta on private jets,” gushed Lovin Malta.

People with butlers and concierges; who will get stuck in traffic in luxury Bentley taxis; and who’ll party at the ‘Millionaires Club’ where “the entry and drinks will be priced high enough to ensure it will be a place where the rich can mingle with each other”. Perhaps they can also mingle with the country’s top minister, Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Keith Schembri, possibly flushed with their €130,000 monthly earnings from 17 Black.

According to the artists’ impression on Coldwell Banker estate agency website (the advert has since been removed), the living areas will have those leather sofas in a recessed ring in the floor with fire in the middle, the kind you see in mafia movies.

“Some have even asked us if there will be helipads on the roof of the tower,” enthused the spokesman of dB, the owning company, who clearly grew up drooling at the opulence of Dallas and Dynasty.

The owners of this ‘I-am-a-Millionaire-Look-at-Me’ block of flats are obviously elated, not only because they’ll get to hobnob with the glitterati but because – as Newsbook estimated – the sales of these flats will yield them at the very least some €752 million. This excludes profits from the hotel, the casino, the lido and the shopping mall, so really we’re talking billions.

I would gladly wish the owners the best of luck, were it not for one minor detail. The land on which this development is taking place is public land in a prime location. It’s yours. It’s mine. It’s ours. It’s been given by the government to the dB company on the cheap – six whole acres (three football pitches) to develop, for the ridiculous sum of a down payment of €5 million and €1 million annually for 10 years.

There is no other way to describe €15 million of public property turned into Billion Plus euro, except: Daylight Robbery.

Public land stolen from us, so that the few will fill up their pockets. The government, the Planning Authority and the owners are so much in cahoots that the permit for development has been issued while the National Audit Office is still investigating this abusive land transfer. How on earth is that possible at all in a functioning democracy?

And there’s another factor to this whole story. This millionaire’s tower won’t attract people who have extra money to dish out – people like that buy property like the French château. It will, instead, only attract people with money they desperately need to hide: money launderers.

But we shouldn’t be surprised should we? At this rate they’ll definitely feel at home here.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

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