Fortina: Who’s going to resign now?

The National Audit Office has done its duty, and the public a service. A merciless light has been shone on how a simple, straightforward deal was manipulated to cost us just under €13 million.

The Fortina land deal was supposed to be routine. The problem is that a hidden valuation report had placed the Sliema site at €18 million – more than double what Fortina actually paid, €8.1 million.

Had the payment been pegged to the property’s true value at the time of development, it could have reached €23.9 million. In other words, the public lost nearly €13 million, handed to a private developer thanks to a report that was quietly buried.

Ah well, love sometimes doesn’t hurt, does it, dear owners of the Fortina?

According to the NAO, the then-Chair of the Lands Authority, Judge Lino Farrugia Sacco, who passed away in 2021, suppressed the report. Keith Schembri, then the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, helped obscure it.

The Lands Authority’s own CEO Robert Vella insisted, even as recently as 2023, that no such valuation existed. Invoices from the auditors had apparently been routed to the Office of the Prime Minister, where Schembri held sway.

The NAO says the Lands Authority “should bear primary responsibility.” That’s neat. And true.

But responsibility is not something you can pass around like a hot potato until it burns out. It has a direction of travel. It climbs up the ladder. And it always lands at the top. Which brings us, inevitably, to Joseph Muscat.

He will no doubt insist, as he always does, that, like Manoel from Barcelona and Sergeant Schulz, he knew nothing. He wasn’t told. He didn’t see.

In his telling, he was the purest of innocents, untouched by the grubby manoeuvrings of the men around him. Malta’s most scandal-ridden prime minister wants to be remembered as Malta’s best – a man whose hands remained clean while his government reeked.

But responsibility doesn’t work like that.

You don’t get to preside over an administration in which public land is undervalued by half, where reports are suppressed, where your chief of staff helps “process” invoices, and then wash your hands when it all comes out. If you didn’t know, that’s incompetence. If you did know, that’s complicity. Either way, it’s yours to own.

And let’s not ignore the twist in the tale: after leaving office, Muscat reportedly became a consultant to Fortina, the very company that benefited from this rigged deal. That may not prove direct involvement in the suppression, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it surely isn’t a pussycat.

So, who’s going to resign now?

Robert Vella, CEO of the Lands Authority, who dismissively responded, “Valuation report? What valuation report?” should seriously consider his position. The ministers who no doubt will claim they were misled need to do the same: if they were – or are – so easily duped, they are not fit to be in charge of public assets.

And what about Keith Schembri? The need for his resignation has long been overtaken by events, given assorted criminal investigations, court appearances, and his exit from the public stage.  We will have to live with his legacy.

And what about his boss, Joseph Muscat, the one with whom he was, or was not, they now try to say, hand in glove?

He will argue, as ever, that he is blameless, pure as the driven snow, and never saw the suppressed report. But when every path leads back to Castille, when his closest aide was directly involved, and when he later profited from the very company that gained from the concealment, the cloak of ignorance becomes a tad threadbare.

We deserve better than shrugged shoulders. Nearly €13 million was lost—not through bad luck or market swings, but through deliberate concealment by those entrusted with safeguarding the nation’s assets.

Yet in Malta, resignation is treated as an exotic import, a foreign custom that never takes root here. The default mode is to hunker down, deny, distract, and outlast the headlines. Hey, why not get yourself sports-washed?

So if Muscat thinks the answer to the question in my headline is “not me,” then the Great Unwashed are entitled to conclude that he has, indeed, already resigned – not from office, that ship has sailed, but from the very idea of leadership.