More White Rocks details required
There is more to the White Rocks project than meets the eye at first glance, certainly more than has been made by the Parliamentary Secretary for Sports, who announced the scheme a week ago, and the Prime Minister, who followed up in his usual Sunday outing. Both waxed lyrical, making basic claims which bear a lot more looking into than the opposition seems to have done when it immediately, if cautiously, welcomed the government's announcement.
The White Rocks site, so happily selected for relatively chic residences for its officers of the armed forces by the British government many years ago, has been going to waste for a couple of decades, begging to be taken in hand but apparently not finding a suitor considered suitable by the Maltese authorities. One main reason touted over the years was that prospective developers of one design or another insisted that residential development had to be included.
Now, what is it exactly that we are getting? The Parliamentary Secretary for Sports stressed the sports village element within the project, even going so far as to mysteriously claim that the UK developers he has been dealing with were not about to make "an investment". He was either misreported or he chose the wrong word, which happens to the best of us.
The project is certainly an investment, not some exercise in philanthropy. The promoters wanted to be allowed to develop some 350 residential apartments to make the project feasible. They are about to be given permission to build 300 plus unspecified retail outlets. Through that investment, they plan to make enough profit to build sports facilities, as yet not fully detailed to the public, and whose cost cannot, therefore, be estimated.
The profits should also allow them to pay the running costs of the facilities (to be handed over to the government) throughout the life of the concession they shall be acquiring, which, as I write on Monday, is still unspecified.
The Prime Minister's sound bite for the project is that this was a public private partnership that would not cost the government "one cent". The good man has got to be kidding but he certainly is not succeeding in that.
The project involves a transfer of a massive tract of land, some 200 tumoli. More than one architect told me that such a prime area, arguably the choicest of them all, would easily fetch €1 million per tumolo. Which means that, if only half the land is to be used for residential development, the state of Malta will be giving up at least €100 million worth of public land. Divide that by half and it still isn't a sneeze.
This is the SmartCity model all over again, only the hands dealing in it are different. There is nothing wrong with such a model, provided we all know exactly what it is in it and that nobody tries to talk us into believing it is costing us nothing.
In addition, there are quite a few questions to be put. Such as: The parliamentary secretary was trying to cut the deal for quite some time, so why was it announced just now, when the details are not as yet concluded? How did the deal come about? Is it the outcome of a public call for tenders? Did the government make it publicly known that it was ready to enter into such a deal and did it try to get other offers so that it could choose what would be best for Malta?
Maybe it has done that. If so, the full details have not reached the public domain.
As always, where a transfer of public land to private interests is concerned, there has to be total transparency and respect for the rules in regard to the latest White Rocks project.
I would imagine that, soon enough, at the political level other questions will be asked. Such as: Do the UK promoters have local agents? If so, who are they? Have the promoters decided how to go about engaging local subcontractors? Do they already have anybody in mind? That sort of thing.
Politics should not get in the way of the facts. At this stage, such facts as the government has doled out simply raise more enquiries.
Lino Spiteri
Times of Malta
17.06.10