Trouble on AUM’s horizon as university struggles to repay creditors

After over a decade of promises of an elite university campus in the heart of Cottonera, the American University of Malta (AUM) is struggling to repay creditors as a result of dwindling student population numbers and the university’s overall mismanagement, The Shift can reveal.

Internal AUM correspondence seen by The Shift shows that, as recently as December last year, at least two creditors were chasing AUM for repayment: La Vallette Outsource Ltd and Titan International Ltd.

La Vallette, which supplies AUM with cleaning staff, was owed €89,054 by the end of 2025. Titan International was owed €4,130 for scheduled maintenance for air conditioning systems.

In November, La Vallette’s operations manager reached out to the AUM to “remind” the so-called university of the significant outstanding balance it owed.

“Mr Mustafa (AUM’s VP of Finance) had previously assured us that a payment of €15,000 would be made at the end of every month; however, we have only received one payment of €8,531 in mid-September,” the email reads, noting the outstanding balance of €89,054.

“We kindly request that you settle the overdue amount at your earliest convenience, as we need to cover our employees’ salaries. Continued delays may affect our ability to maintain regular operations and could impact the quality of services provided,” the email continues.

Despite the manager’s efforts to collect the money owed to La Vallette, it took the AUM over a month to respond to the request.

“As from tomorrow, please reduce the number of cleaners at British Building to four personnel. Thank you,” the AUM wrote back.  No further acknowledgement of the outstanding balance was made in the correspondence seen by The Shift.

Questions sent to La Vallette were acknowledged, but no answers were received by the time of publication.

Titan International’s attempts at recouping the money they were owed also suffered similar delays. In October, one of Titan International’s financial officers reached out to the AUM because another maintenance visit was due that month, but the pending payments from a previous visit in April had not yet been settled.

By the following month, the university’s invoice remained unpaid, and the AUM’s operations and maintenance manager responded to reminders in an increasingly curt manner. 

By 1 December, the AUM’s representative began saying he could not “do more” than he was already doing, while apologising profusely to the company’s representative.

Titan International also did not respond to The Shift’s request for comment by publication time. Questions sent to the AUM also remained mostly unanswered.

In a brief response, the AUM’s operations and maintenance manager claimed that “while the company had delayed the submission of financial statements, it has now come in line with its requirements” without providing any further details or evidence to support the claim.

Sadeen Education Investment Ltd, the company behind the AUM, has not filed audited accounts since 2022. The holdings company bearing the same namesake, Sadeen Malta Holding Ltd, last filed audited accounts in 2019.

The manager also claimed that “the company confirms that it does not have any solvency issues,” without providing any further explanation.

Besides failing to answer The Shift’s questions about the debts owed to La Vallette Outsource Ltd and Titan International Ltd, the AUM also declined to explain why it failed to file its audited accounts. The university also refused to confirm how many new students it planned on welcoming to its campus this year.

While we could confirm the existence of at least two creditors, multiple sources with insight into the AUM’s debts noted that the actual figure amounted to hundreds of thousands of euro.

The AUM also declined to state whether it was confident it could pass an upcoming audit by the Malta Further & Higher Education Authority (MFHEA) in July, nor did it comment on how it planned to address its liquidity issues.

The university’s decline has been the subject of multiple reports recently published by The Shift.

In February, the AUM was once more catapulted into the spotlight following its badly received decision to order the removal of boats from its waterfront, which it claims is part of the concession agreement it signed with the administration of disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat.

Following The Shift’s reporting about the derelict student hostel which the AUM offers as accommodation, the AUM embarked on a social media campaign to dismiss concerns about the glaring health and safety issues in the student hostel – a narrative contradicted by internal chats published by The Shift.

At the start of this year, the university also refused to comment on alleged threats of aggressive deportation efforts against its own students, some of whom absconded from the country after a gruelling escape from Afghanistan following the Taliban’s takeover.