The Nationalist Party has requested the Naxxar mayor to resign because of an "undeclared conflict of interest".

The request follows the mayor's vote in favour of a massive residential and commercial complex on the parking lot of the former Naxxar trade fair grounds.

The approved project will be split into two elliptical blocks - measuring eight and 10 floors high - and will include a public open space in between the two towers.

The mayor, Anne Marie Muscat Fenech Adami, who represents the PN, voted in favour.

She sat on the PA board given the enormity of the proposal and noted that while the revised plans had taken on board many of the authority’s concerns, they still did not address the height of the development.

However, she voted in favour of the project “because we cannot have everything”.

It later emerged that she is a company secretary in a firm partly owned by Edwin Mintoff, the project’s architect.

However, she told Malta Today she saw no conflict of interest. “I work with the company. It is not mine. Everyone has a job. They are two different jobs, and I see no conflict of interest.”

In a statement on Sunday, the PN said that general secretary Michael Piccinino discussed the matter with the mayor in the afternoon after talking to PN leader Bernard Grech, requesting her to resign in view of her undeclared conflict of interest.

The PN said that if Muscat Fenech Adami failed to submit her resignation within 24 hours, the case would be moved to the party’s Discipline and Ethics Commission for investigation.

The party said it demanded the highest standards from anyone representing it.