An almost decade-long dispute between Church authorities and the heirs of a stately Marsascala building came to a head this week, with the court ordering the State to pay the family some €167,000 in compensation after finding that its rights had been breached.

The building at the heart of the dispute, Palazzo Manduca Delicata, is an elegant early 20th-century palatial building with a 700-square metre footprint in Marsascala’s Triq La Senglea. It was originally built by Giuseppe Manduca Delicata for his son.

Owned by the Lanfranco family, the building has been under the control of Church authorities for several decades, after the original owners agreed to rent it to the Marsascala parish to be used as the domus curiae, a residence for clerics within the parish and a space for parish activities.

The building was then handed over to MUSEUM, the Society of the Christian Doctrine, and used for doctrine teaching, “without the family’s consent”, family members told Times of Malta. During this time, the family claim, several unauthorised alterations were made to the building’s interior.

In return, the family have been receiving rental payments of just under €700 a year, amounting to a total of just under €24,000 between 1987 and 2021, a sum that they argued in court proceedings was derisory.

The courts agreed, calculating that the rent that should have been paid over those years should have exceeded €314,000. 

Building fell through the cracks of revised rent laws

Complicating matters even further, the lease agreement through which the building was leased to the Church was neither a residential nor a commercial lease and, the courts agreed, the building could not be considered a band club.

This meant that while the revised rent laws introduced measures for owners of residential or commercial properties to adjust rent or reclaim their properties, properties leased through sui generis leases, such as Palazzo Manduca Delicata, fell through the cracks. 

‘The door was closed in our face’: family members

Family members who spoke to Times of Malta said that they initially tried to resolve the dispute amicably, approaching the Church authorities with the intention of renegotiating the deal or finding an alternative resolution.

“But the door was closed in our face,” one family member said, leading them to open proceedings, which they eventually lost, through the rent regulation board in 2016 in the hope of reclaiming their property.

With the 2016 proceedings moving at a snail’s pace, the family turned to the constitutional court, which this week found in their favour, declaring the lease to be anti-constitutional and granting €167,000 in compensation.

It is unclear whether the State intends to appeal the sentence in the coming weeks.