Cabinet to decide Freeport planning gain fee appeal

It will be Cabinet and not the Planning Appeals Board that will decide whether the Freeport will have to pay €700,000 for a permit to dredge Marsaxlokk Bay.

The Malta Freeport Terminal filed an appeal before the board contesting a planning gain payment of €700,000, imposed as a condition when a permit to carry out dredging works was granted last February.

But, unlike in other cases, the final decision will not be taken by the appeals board but by Cabinet as stipulated in article 15A of the Development Planning Act.

This is the first time this article of the planning act is being put into force in this legislature.

A spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister confirmed that, instead of deciding, the appeals board would make a set of recommendations to the Prime Minister, who, in turn, would refer the matter to Cabinet.

The article states: "Where the minister decides to refer to Cabinet an application called in by him, he shall request the appeals board to draw up its recommendation on that application after having heard the parties and the appeals board shall send its recommendation on that particular application to the minister who shall refer it to Cabinet. Such recommendation shall be available to the public."

According to the law, this can only be done for applications of strategic significance, that affect national security or interests, that affect the interests of other governments, that are subject to an environmental impact assessment, which is of national interest, or where the applicant is a government department.

The Freeport had already tried to have the planning gain waived by filing a request before the Mepa board, which was turned down in August.

During the hearing, the company had argued that, throughout negotiations for the privatisation of the Freeport, the new operators were obliged to carry out any dredging works at their own expense, contrary to normal custom. As a result, the planning gain was "extra" and "unfair".

Also, they argued, the sea was not private land and did not belong to anyone.

The planning gain is calculated according to a set formula - €1.16 per square metre - and is put into a common fund overseen by Mepa. Part of the gain is sometimes given to the local council in question to be used in the locality.

The spokesman clarified that article 15A of the Planning Act existed for several years and had nothing to do with a recent legal notice, which waived the planning gain for projects of national interest, issued in December.

The issue of the Freeport's planning gain was raised last week by board member and Labour MP Roderick Galdes during a hearing where the company was given the green light to build an extension to Terminal 1.

Mr Galdes, the only one who voted against the extension project, had asked the board whether the Freeport would still pay its planning gain, especially in light of the new legal notice, which, he said, had been introduced "quietly".

Mepa chairman Austin Walker had replied that unless "an overriding power" stepped in, the company would still have to pay the planning gain.

The permit to dredge the bay was granted in February and forms part of a huge investment project in the Freeport worth about €130 million.

During the same hearing, the board turned down a request to extend Terminal 1 by 130,000 square metres because of "an overriding public interest".

But the Freeport requested a reconsideration and, last week, almost one year since the first hearing, it was given the go-ahead for the extension project, a decision that highly angered the residents present for the hearing,

As part of the expansion project, the Freeport also committed itself to generate about 500 new jobs over the next five years.