This is part one of a two-part series. The second article digs into court cases and investigates issues surrounding medieval claims and residents' fightback over the lands which are now worth millions.

A petition designed to counter the threat of land dispossessions in Nadur, which caused turmoil there last month, has been badly hit by the coronavirus scare, Times of Malta has learnt. 

The petition was launched by the Nadur local council in the aftermath of registrations of land ownership of two tracts of land, spanning the size of around four football pitches.

The land registrations – which involve about three dozen houses and developable agricultural land in the town centre – were done by lawyer Carmelo Galea on behalf of the Benefiċċju ta’ Sant’ Antonio Delli Navarra, a foundation set up in 1675.

Notaries spoke of fear of property dispossessions keeping people awake at night. Hundreds of tetchy residents attended a recent meeting with Parliamentary Secretary Alex Muscat.

The anxiety then spread throughout Gozo, as evidenced by hundreds of people queuing outside the Land Registry every morning to check on their properties – queues that only disappeared when the Land Registry closed its doors to the public.

A lawyer said the affected elderly were “really suffering” from the double scares of land registrations and coronavirus.

Worried people queue at the Gozo Land Registry to check on the status of their property. Photo: Victor Paul Borg

Nadur mayor Edward Said would only say when contacted that “hundreds” of people signed the petition but added that the coronavirus scare had depressed the number of signatures. The petition was made available in all local council offices in Gozo for less than a week and was not put online for viewing or signing. In Victoria, Gozo’s largest town, not a single signature was collected.

The mayor, Josef Schembri, told Times of Malta that the timing was bad. “The day we put the petition at the office for the public to sign was the same day that we simultaneously started telling the public to avoid coming to the local council due to the coronavirus”.

The petition, which has now been sent to the prime minister among others, calls for a “political solution” to the land registration jitters.

Other requests range from the specific – to revoke Dr Galea’s registrations of ownership – to the general call for legal amendments to counter a regression towards a “feudal system” in which someone of noble lineage digs out deeds of hundreds of years ago and makes a “pretence to” ownership of a locality or a large part of it.

Sources within the Land Registry said ongoing investigations launched by the parliamentary secretary are complex because peasants were not in the habit of keeping proper notarial records prior to the war. 

Talking generally, one source said that fields in Gozo prior to the war weren’t considered valuable – and were sometimes traded for a handful of cows.

These fields now fall in the development zone and fetch hundreds of thousands of euros.