Corruption update (can we keep up?)

It’s bad enough that payment to Marco Gaffarena in the corrupt deal he struck with the Government Property Division (Minister in charge: Joseph Muscat; Michael Falzon reports to him as parliamentary secretary) includes land which he has been using illegally for years as a restaurant, bar, nightclub and public pool called Cavett’s Place.

It’s bad enough that he has covered that land with illegal buildings.

It’s bad enough that he runs Cavett’s Place in partnership with a drug-dealer, Antoine Azzopardi aka Ic-Cavett, who was busted seven years ago on cocaine and cannabis trafficking charges and about whose trial we have heard nothing since (his lawyers are Emmanuel Mallia & Associates).

It’s bad enough that the corrupt deal took place at all and that no authority has stopped Gaffarena’s illegal, brazen use of the land in all this time, or his illegal restaurant practices, despite an enforcement notice made in 2012.

It’s bad enough that his illegal use of the land is blatant, offensive and done with complete impunity, advertised on Facebook and used even by senior figures in the Labour Party for their ‘events’.

All of this screams ‘corruption’.

But where it gets worse is the discovery, reported by Times of Malta today, that architects for the Government Property Division gave that land at Tal-Handaq a low value because of the illegal buildings on it, and that is why Gaffarena got a lot of other land elsewhere as well to make up the difference in value.

This when the illegal buildings are his own.

How corrupt. It’s sickening.