Collapsed Kordin Building Was In Breach Of Contract Before It Killed Sofia
The collapsed Kordin building which killed Jean Paul Sofia in December was in breach of its contractual conditions before the fatal tragedy.
INDIS, a government body, which allocated the site to developers Schembri and Buhagiar, has claimed that the concession agreement stipulated that works should have been carried out within 18 months after permits were issued in April 2020.
However, no attempts seem to have been made to enforce these conditions.INDIS has now filed court claims in a bid to take the land back from the developers.
The government-owned site was given by Malta Industrial Parks Limited (today INDIS) in 2020 to Matthew Schembri and Kurt Buhagiar, who both appeared on the contract in the name of the company AllPlus Limited.
Kurt Buhagiar became driver to the CEO of the Lands Authority and was also reportedly arrested and charged with human trafficking in 2009, spending over a year in an Italian prison.
The works were still incomplete when it collapsed and killed Jean Paul Sofia in December 2022. It was closed off under orders of the magistrate involved in the inquiry.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, with several questions left unanswered.
“The Prime Minister could not confirm that the magisterial inquiry will investigate the transfer of the land, and it was reported that he even said that a government entity should investigate the agreement after the magisterial inquiry. This is absurd,” PN MP Rebekah Borg wrote today on social media.
“All the works carried out had to be done ‘in a substantial and workmanlike manner utilising the best quality materials available’. This had to be done to INDIS’s satisfaction. Don’t we have a right to know if INDIS’s satisfaction was met?” she wrote in a slew of posts today.
The Government Lands Act, she continued, provides for a number of ways in which Government land can be transferred by temporary emphyteusis including ‘if it consists in land which is offered for an industrial project after applicant would have satisfied the competent authority about the benefit which the project would render to the country’s economy and that it would create an adequate number of jobs’.
The developers submitted a Malta Enterprise application to be granted 300 square metres of land in May 2019, and were given the green light just the following month.
“Don’t we have a right to know how Kurt Buhagiar satisfied these criteria? How the deal was concocted? Who approached who and how?” she questioned.
Isabelle Bonnici, Sofia’s mother, has been pushing for a public inquiry into her son’s death. The motion was shot down in parliament after 40 Labour MPs unanimously voted against it.
A vigil in his honour will be held tomorrow in front of the Prime Minister’s office at 8pm.
Watch this interview of Isabelle Bonnici ahead of tomorrow’s vigil.
READ NEXT: 20 Maltese Firefighters Travel To Greece To Battle Wildfires
