Suppressed €10m valuation: how Sliema’s seafront was sold short

Top Lands official ‘suppressed’ valuation report, saving Fortina over €10m – and Sliema residents are furious
By Hot Malta Staff

Sliema’s skyline has always been a battleground between developers’ dreams and residents’ nightmares, but a fresh court filing suggests the latest round was decided in a back room, not a boardroom.

According to a sworn application filed last week by the Attorney General against former Lands Authority CEO Robert Vella, a 2019 valuation that would have forced the Fortina Group to pay an extra €10.3 million for a 7,500 m² tract of prime Tigné seafront was deliberately “suppressed” and replaced with a figure €10.3 million lower. The land, carved from the old Għar id-Dud quarry and part of the 17th-century bastion network that once guarded Valletta’s outer harbour, was handed to Fortina for a mixed-use tower that will now rise to 31 storeys—almost double the height of the adjacent 1920s Parish Church of Jesus of Nazareth.

For Sliema locals, the revelation is more than a bookkeeping spat; it is confirmation that the town’s soul is being traded by spreadsheet.

“Ten million could have refurbished every school in the district, or built 200 social housing units,” says Andre Callus from Moviment Graffitti, who has spent Saturday mornings handing out leaflets opposite the site. “Instead it’s vanished into someone’s profit margin.”

A walk along the Sliema front on Tuesday evening shows why emotions run hot. Pensioners still queue for ħobż biż-żejt at 1950s kiosks while foreign workers jog past cranes that cast long shadows over the traditional stone balustrades. The Fortina project, marketed internally as “Tigné Riviera”, promises 160 luxury flats, a 150-key hotel and a rooftop infinity pool cantilevered over the water. Supporters say it will bring jobs; critics call it a gated community in the sky.

What hurts most, residents say, is the cultural symmetry that will be lost. The Għar id-Dud area is named after the 1590s chapel built by the Order of St John to give thanks for the end of a drought; its limestone walls still carry the graffiti of British sailors who watched the 1943 Italian armistice signed in Malta. “Every stone here tells a story,” says 68-year-old Mariella Zammit, whose family has owned a townhouse on Tower Road since 1890. “Now the story is about who can fiddle a valuation.”

Court documents seen by Hot Malta show that the original 2019 appraisal, carried out by independent architects, priced the land at €22.7 million based on comparable seafront sales. A second report, commissioned months later and signed only by an internal Lands officer, slashed the figure to €12.4 million. The difference was pocketed, prosecutors allege, through an upfront “infrastructure concession” that never went to public tender.

Fortina Group, chaired by hotelier George Fenech, insists it “followed every procedure” and is not accused of wrongdoing. Yet the company’s own 2020 investor presentation, circulated to Gulf finance houses, lists the reduced price as a “strategic saving” that “unlocks IRR above 28 %”. Translation: the lower the land cost, the fatter the dividend for shareholders.

The timing stings. Malta is grappling with a housing affordability crisis that has pushed average purchase prices up 45 % since 2016. A recent University of Malta study found that 38 % of 25- to 34-year-olds still live with parents, the highest rate in the EU. “When public land is flogged off at a discount, we’re essentially subsidising luxury for non-residents while pricing our own children out of the market,” economist Marie Briguglio told parliament’s environment committee last month.

Tourism stakeholders are also worried. The Fortina tower will block sunset views from the popular Exiles bathing lido, a magnet for Instagram influencers who tag #MaltaSunset 200,000 times a year. “We sell Malta on its authenticity,” says hotelier Michael Zammit Tabona. “If the skyline becomes Dubai-lite, we lose the very USP that fills airline seats.”

Meanwhile, the bastion rock beneath the site is crumbling. Heritage NGO Din l-Art Ħelwa warns that excavation works have already widened fissures in the 400-year-old counterscarp. “You can’t put a price on stability—literally,” says president Alex Torpiano, standing where knights once hoisted cannonballs onto mule carts.

Robert Vella, who resigned from the Lands Authority in 2021 and now advises a Dubai property fund, has pleaded not guilty to fraud, misappropriation and abuse of office. He was released on €30,000 bail—roughly the cost of a one-bedroom flat in the tower he helped enable.

As the case trudges through Malta’s choked courts, Sliema residents have found a rallying cry: “€10 million, our future.” A protest flotilla of traditional luzzus is planned for 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, when the bay normally glows with candle-lit boats. organisers hope to recreate the 1996 citizen blockade that stopped a yacht marina in Balluta Bay. Whether history repeats itself will depend less on maritime muscle than on whether Maltese institutions finally place community value over balance-sheet value.

Because in a country where every square metre of limestone is a page of a larger story, suppressing a valuation is not just a fiscal offence—it’s tearing pages out of the national manuscript. And once those pages are gone, no amount of glass and steel can rewrite them.