Pressure increases for Johann Buttigieg’s sacking

Pressure for the sacking of the PA’s Executive Chairman Johann Buttigieg is intensifying as eleven youth and student organisations have called on Prime Minister Robert Abela to take immediate action.

Convened by Front Żgħażagħ għall-Ambjent (FŻA), the organisations wrote jointly to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Infrastructure, Planning and Employment, Jonatan Attard, calling for Buttigieg’s dismissal.

In their letter, the organisations said that in the mobile chats that have become public, Buttigieg assured businessman Yorgen Fenech that he would enter business with him “wherever he wished”, discussed planning matters with him and disclosed information about another developer’s project on the day it reached the authority’s board.

“A regulator who offers his partnership to a businessman he was appointed to regulate has shown whom he serves,” the organisations wrote. “And it is not the public.”

The signatories rejected Prime Minister Robert Abela’s argument that the messages were already public and contained nothing new.

They argued that the government must account for Buttigieg’s January 2025 reappointment regardless.

“If the Government knew, it must explain why it reappointed him. If it did not know enough to judge them, it must explain how he was vetted. There is no third answer.”

FŻA chairperson Dr Bernard Galea said the government had failed to answer the central question.

“This is not a development dispute,” he said. “It is about whether public office in this country is held in trust for the people or for the most powerful among them.”

The intervention follows an earlier demand by ten NGOs for Buttigieg’s dismissal.

The youth organisations said planning reform required credible leadership, concluding: “Mr Buttigieg cannot remain at the head of the Planning Authority, and a Government that leaves him there has made his conduct its own.”