Fortina Cash Probe: Sliema’s €30k Question and the Land That Cost Less Than a Flat

Lands chief received payments from Fortina CEO in year of ‘undervalued’ deal
————————————————
By [Hot Malta Staff] | 06 June 2025 | 09:00 CEST

Sliema’s seafront has always been a stage where money, sun and history collide. Joggers pant past 19th-century townhouses, pensioners feed pigeons under tamarisk trees, and developers circle like gulls above a trawler. This week the view from the Fortina Hotel’s infinity pool turned murkier than the June haze: parliamentary files show that Mark Gaffarena, former CEO of the Fortina Group, channelled €30,000 in “consultancy” payments to Johann Vassallo while Vassallo, then chairman of the Lands Authority, rubber-stamped a 2019 emphyteutical concession for a Fortina-owned plot at Tigné. The price? €1.7 million for 4,600 m² of prime public land—less than the cost of a three-bedroom flat across the road.

Valletta’s coffee shops, already simmering over the hospitals scandal, went into overdrive. “They’re selling us by the square metre,” barked a kinnie-sipping regular at Café Cordina, echoing a Maltese lament older than the Knights. The sum may seem small beside the €4 billion Vitals affair, but the symbolism is titanic: another slice of Malta’s finite shoreline quietly privatised, another whiff of cronyism drifting over the Grand Harbour like greased focaccia smoke.

The timeline is damning. In March 2019 the Lands Authority board—appointed directly by then-minister Ian Borg—accepted an internal valuation that priced the Tigné parcel at €370 per m². Two independent appraisers later told the Public Accounts Committee the real figure should have been at least €650. By June, Gaffarena’s company had paid Vassallo’s private firm “MV Solutions” three instalments of €10,000 each, listed as “project advisory fees”. Vassallo insists the money was for “unrelated tourism consultancy” in Gozo and claims he recused himself from the vote. Yet the minutes show he chaired the meeting that approved the concession, only stepping out for “a brief coffee break” during the ballot.

For Sliema residents, the revelation feels like déjà vu. The same stretch of coast already hosts the “Fortina Spa Village”, a glass cliff that replaced a public garden in 2011 after a similar emphyteusis. Local councillor Michael Briguglio (PN) says the new development will add another 120 luxury suites and a rooftop lagoon. “We’re turning the peninsula into a private members’ club,” he told Hot Malta, gesturing towards the crane-crowded horizon. “Soon you’ll need a keycard to watch the sunset.”

Cultural guardians fear the erosion goes beyond bricks. The Tigné promenade is where teenagers learn to ride bikes, where Ghana fishermen once mended nets, where festa fireworks reflect in the water each August. “Public space is our agora,” says Prof. Sandro Debono, curator of the national art collection. “When it shrinks, citizenship itself contracts.”

The economic stakes are equally stark. Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo boasted last month that Malta needs four million visitors by 2030 to keep GDP afloat. But bed-to-resident ratios in Sliema already top 12:1, the highest in Europe. More five-star inventory risks cannibalising the very charm that lures high-spenders.

Opposition MP Karol Aquilina has tabled a motion to rescind the concession, citing “manifest conflict of interest”. The Standards Commissioner has launched an inquiry; Vassallo resigned from the Lands Authority in 2021 but remains on several government boards. Gaffarena, meanwhile, is expanding the Fortina brand to Sicily and Dubai. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Back on the Sliema front, morning swimmers tread water beneath the Fortina’s yellow façade, unaware their laps skirt land now locked away for 99 years. “We used to joke the sea was the only thing they couldn’t sell,” laughs 72-year-old Nannu Ġużepp, drying off after his daily kilometre. “Give them time,” he shrugs, nodding towards a super-yacht idling just outside territorial waters.

Conclusion
Malta’s greatest natural resource has never been limestone or luzzus—it is trust, the invisible cement that lets neighbours leave keys under the mat and strangers give directions in three languages. Every “consultancy” paid on the quiet, every hectare hustled below market rate, chips away at that resource until the island feels less like a homeland and more like a cash register with a beach view. Until the Lands Authority opens its books as wide as its windows overlook the sea, the Fortina deal will remain another layer of salt in a wound that refuses to heal.