Gozitan developer Joseph Portelli and his associates, including Mark Agius (known as Ta’ Dirjanu), Daniel Refalo, and Peter Borg, the co-owner of Welbees supermarket, are openly defying a court order by trying to sell an illegally built hotel in Mellieha.

Despite a court ruling last year revoking the permit for the Mellieha building, declaring that the area should never have been used to build a hotel, Portelli and his associates have started advertising the sale of their illegal building for €4.2 million.

Masking the illegal hotel as a “guesthouse with 46 rooms” and describing the area they ruined as “a part of paradise,” the group of businessmen also suggests to potential buyers that the building could be used as a “personal retreat” house.

One of the ads marketing the sale of Portelli’s illegal hotel in Mellieha.

The building, at the entrance of Mellieha, is part of a sprawling complex in the area where the iconic Bellview bakery used to operate.

Apart from the illegal hotel and two extra floors, which should have been dismantled as they were deemed irregular by the court, Portelli and his associates also built 120 apartments, most of which have been sold.

Following the court’s decision last year, Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo, from Mellieha, approved the permit when he formed part of the Planning Authority in 2019. Later, he declared that the Malta Tourism Authority would not issue an operating licence for the hotel once it was declared illegal.

His cabinet colleague, Minister Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi, responsible for the Planning Authority, declined to state whether the government would order Portelli to remove the two illegally built floors.

The Planning Authority awarded Portelli the permit in breach of its own policies. It allowed the development to be increased by an additional two storeys,  erroneously using a policy for hotel development introduced by Labour in 2014.

The policy allows hotel developers an extra two floors above the area’s height limitations in favour of “quality tourism”.

However, the court later declared that a permit for a hotel should never have been issued as the area is residential. Thus, the hotel permit was revoked, along with the extra two storeys built with the help of the Planning Authority.

Moreover, the large plot of land on which the illegal development was built used to be public land. Left abandoned for years, the government had initially intended to turn it into a public garden and a building for the Mellieha local council.

Everything changed as soon as Labour returned to power in 2013. The public land was instead sold to Peter Borg of Welbees and his associates, who later struck a deal with Joseph Portelli.

The development’s architect, Joseph Bondin, is also a shareholder in the same investment, possibly in breach of the architect’s professional code of ethics.