Building a new road from Żabbar to Smart City will only benefit the wealthy few who stand to get rich through real estate speculation at the coastal location, the Green Party said on Saturday.

ADPD chairperson Sandra Gauci noted that when land to develop a high-tech ‘Smart City’ hub was handed to Dubai investors in 2007, the deal explicitly stated that the only residential development allowed was that needed for hub workers.

That project never got off the ground, but rather than taking back the private land, the government renegotiated a deal to allow developers to turn it into a commercial and residential project.

Now, the government has said it intends to develop a new road to the area.

 “Public land keeps being dished out in a piecemeal fashion for fat cats to keep making a killing” Gauci said.  

The Kalkara area is now poised to be turned into a real estate mecca.

The Dubai developers who were granted a 99-year lease for the land sublet part of that land to Shoreline Holdings, which has developed a shopping mall and 400 apartments there.

An 11-storey hotel will also rise in the area, and an application for 69 villas is currently being assessed by planners.

Aside from those projects, the Institute for Tourism Studies has announced plans to develop a €60 million campus there, and the American University of Malta has been promised its own campus there in exchange for relinquishing land in Żonqor.

“All this goes on to show how the government is being held hostage by financial interests that leave the general public out in the cold in their own country, with public land being lost by the hour,” Gauci said.

Speaking on Saturday, ADPD representatives noted that plans to build a new road to the area would “obliterate 80,000 square meters of agricultural land, the size of 11 football pitches.”

ADPD speakers at Saturday's press conference.

 ADPD Deputy Secretary General Mario Mallia remarked that 30 cars every day are being added to our already congested roads.  The last thing that should be on the country’s mind given this stark reality is encouraging this pattern even further, rather than investing in alternative means of transport, he said.

Mallia said the party backed calls by Friends of the Earth Malta to develop a ferry link between Valletta, Cospicua and Smart City instead of the new road.

“This proposal is much more logical than the creation of yet another road that will gobble up more of the precious little agricultural land available,” he said.

Mallia was critical of Prime Minister Robert Abela’s suggestion that families could spend quality time at the recently inaugurated Shoreline shopping mall.

“Children and their families in the south should be guaranteed the right to spend their quality time in fresh air and in open spaces, not in a commercial complex which robs the public of yet another piece of the country’s foreshore” he argued. 

The government should extend the San Klement park to encompass the Cottonera Lines, he said.