The President of Malta’s Developers’ lobby Sandro Chetcuti had an office at the Labour Party Headquarters in the months leading up to the 2013 general election, Speaker Anglu Farrugia has revealed.

Speaking in the public inquiry into the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Farrugia, who used to be the PL’s deputy leader for party affairs, said that Chetcuti had an office on the infamous fourth floor, where several meetings with high profile business people and the planning for the general election took place.

Farrugia was called in by the board to explain a 2013 interview he gave to Times of Malta, where he expressed fears that the Labour Party was in bed with big business.

“Unfortunately, [I] was so loyal to Joseph Muscat that he gave him total leeway and didn’t realise [I] was being stabbed in the back. This is like calling your best friend over and then shooting him in cold blood. It was a political murder,” he said at the time.

While Farrugia was short on answers on the plethora of businesspeople in the Labour Party headquarters in the months and year leading up to the 2013 general election, he regularly mentioned one name.

“Sandro Chetcuti was there. I know this for certain because he had an office on the fourth floor,” he told the inquiry.

Farrugia, despite being Deputy Leader at the time, never had access to the fourth floor, even if the Labour Party’s forthcoming election bid was being planned within its walls.

“I always found it locked,” he told the inquiry board.

“The election was so strong, I knew it was massively funded somehow, and I needed to speak up,” he continued.

Farrugia was made to resign as Deputy Leader in December 2012, meaning that Chetcuti had an office at the start of 2013.

The Prime Minister’s former Chief of Staff Keith Schembri, who is widely seen as Muscat’s key to the business world, also held an office on the same floor. That office is yet to be searched by police investigators.

Chetcuti was back then the Vice President of the MDA, having been elected as the lobby’s president on 16th January 2014. However, the Labour Party government has since gone on to lead a construction boom, where dubious permits and public land are handed out a la carte to cash-hungry developers.

Meanwhile, questions have long been raised about the party’s business interests, with the commercial lobby abandoning the PN in favour of Muscat in the lead-up to 2013.