As usual, excellent work by The Shift over Robert Abela’ guest house project in Xewkija, Gozo. There has been a lot of back and forth going on between the previous owner of the land and Lydia Abela over the purchase of the land where Robert Abela wants to extend his guest house including discussions on public contracts and regular pressure on the owner by Lydia Abela herself. This is a visual image of the land in question.
There are many issues with this scandal. Apart from the blatant rent-seeking methods by which Robert Abela acquired the adjacent land, there is also the issue of a Prime Minister building a guest house in what previously was agricultural land. If this isn’t a blatant disrespect to Malta’s development policies I don’t know what is. Here we have a Prime Minister investing his money, money that has been acquired through long years of rent-seeking from the state, to speculate in an already over-saturated rental market that is also the cause of various growing social problems and a development disaster.
This is a developing story and there is much more that will be revealed about this scandal.
These people have no shame is the understatement of the year