Muscat’s ‘To Do List’ of deals: another one ticked off

Early in 2014, the word began to do the rounds that the government planned to give leading Taghna Lkoll switcher Silvio Debono, owner of the Seabank Hotel in Mellieha and the Hard Rock Malta franchise, the site of the Institute for Tourism Studies for his planned Hard Rock Hotel. By mid-2014, the talk was so strong, and industry-based, that Malta Today rang him and asked.

“I am interested in opening a five-star hotel and I am waiting for calls of expressions of interest issued by the government on various sites, to find a site for it,” he told the newspaper. Malta Today reported it as a denial, but to my mind it looks more like a confirmation by somebody who couldn’t say that he didn’t want the site and yet couldn’t say that he’d been promised it.

The talk didn’t stop after that. It got worse. Then a year later (last summer) sources in politics informed me that Silvio Debono, who shares a public relations consultant, Lou Bondi, with the Prime Minister, had let a couple of things slip. He had spoken in such as a way as to lead his interlocutors to believe that he had it in the bag.

I rang a couple of senior sources in the hotel industry. What did they think/know? “No, come on – I don’t think that’s true,” said one. “How can the government possibly hope to get away with given all that prime area land to Silvio Debono? There would be uproar. There are five five-star hotels in the area and they would all object, for a start. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

So I dropped it, even though it occurred to me that given the ownership of the other hotels in the area, they most certainly were not going to prejudice their relationship with the government by putting up opposition or standing in the way of any such plans, either privately or publicly.

But then in October, the government announced that €56 million in public funds would be spent on building a new campus for the Institute of Tourism Studies at Smart City, a part of the island far removed from Malta’s tourism centre unless you count the eventual construction of the Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah Higher Institute of Relaxation and Sunbathing just up the road at Zonqor Point.

The building overlooking St George’s Bay near Paceville, where the Institute has been housed since its inception, would be the subject of a formal request for proposals for the construction of a “tourism-related project”, the government said when announcing the move. The tender was announced a month later, last November, and the result announced two months after that (last week).

Surprise, surprise – a consortium made up of three companies owned by Silvio Debono, or in which he is the majority shareholder, is the sole bidder and winner. The consortium is called City Centre Consortium, and it is made up of SD Holdings, Seaport Franchising and the Seabank Hotel.

Silvio Debono spent the few years leading up to the last general election currying favour with Muscat’s party while pretending to be a Nationalist stalwart (Nationalist MP Francis Zammit Dimech still sits on the board of the Seabank Hotel) – a process initiated subtly and much earlier by his friendship with Magistrate Consuelo Herrera, her companion Robert Musumeci and her brother Jose Herrera, which led him to develop close relations with the Labour leader Joseph Muscat, with the extended ‘Super One’ social network, and with the parallel circle that includes Labour Party henchman and criminal lawyer Vince Micallef and the Pullicino Orlando crowd.

A few months after Labour won the general election, Debono was a guest of honour (see photographs) at the wedding of Jonathan Attard, an anchorman and newscaster at the Labour Party’s television station, Super One, who Economy Minister Chris Cardona moved from the party payroll to the state payroll as a member of his private secretariat.