The steady rise and rapid fall of Roderick Galdes

A brief statement just after 7pm on Saturday announcing Housing Minister Roderick Galdes’s resignation brought an abrupt end to his 13-year stint in the upper echelons of Maltese politics, amid mounting scrutiny over his personal and political dealings.

Galdes, who spent the past six years as a government minister, said he was stepping down to clear his name from what he described as “synchronised attacks to ruin my political career, as well as personal attacks even on my family”.

He had spent much of the previous decade flying under the radar, typically seen as a steady and dependable hand in both the Muscat and Abela administrations, first as a junior minister and, later, as a fully-fledged member of cabinet.

However, storm clouds had been gathering of late, with a series of questions raised over his personal and professional dealings over the past 18 months.

Headway

Galdes made his first steps in party politics as a young man, being elected to his hometown, Qormi’s first ever local council in May 1994. He dutifully served as a councillor for seven years before being elected the town’s first Labour mayor in 2001.

Roderick Galdes (third from the left) was elected to Qormi’s first local council in 1994. Photo: Qormi Local Council

By 2004, at the age of 29, Galdes had followed in the steps of many other local councillors before him, nabbing a seat in parliament in the place of John Attard Montalto, who departed to take up one of Malta’s first five MEP seats.

An urban planner by profession, Galdes quickly became the Labour Party’s spokesperson on planning issues as well as its representative on the planning authority board, finding himself the only dissenting voice when Renzo Piano’s controversial City Gate project was approved.

In 2013, with Labour back in power, he was named junior minister for agriculture, fisheries and animal rights, under the watchful eye of then minister Leo Brincat.

Uneventful

Galdes’s early years in government were generally uneventful, marked by the occasional dispute with vegetable vendors and a series of infrastructural developments, including the opening of the Ta’ Qali dog park and animal hospital.

However, his decision to replace popular fisheries head Joe Caruana with Andreina Fenech Farrugia in 2013 would age poorly, with the latter now facing bribery, corruption and money laundering charges for her alleged role in an illegal tuna racket.

Roderick Galdes was named parliamentary secretary for agriculture in 2013. File photo: Matthew Mirabelli

As a junior minister for animal rights, Galdes also found himself in the eye of the storm in the months leading up to the 2015 spring hunting referendum, often to the dismay of the anti-hunting lobby.

In one 2013 interview, Galdes let slip that the government had found a “technical loophole” to allow bird trapping to go ahead despite an EU crackdown, prompting a desperate PR scramble to retract his comments.

His slip of the tongue remains prescient 13 years later, with Malta’s trapping of protected finches for “research purposes” now under the EU’s spotlight.

Nevertheless, Galdes’s earliest brush with controversy came in 2016, when his consultant, Bertu Pace, found himself under police investigation over the granting of a permit for a villa on ODZ land in Siġġiewi. Pace was suspended pending the investigation.

Two years later, another official in his secretariat would end up the subject of a police probe, this time over bribery allegations. The official, who was suspended once the allegations emerged, was reported to have received €400 in exchange for assigning a State-owned property to a member of the public.

Minister

By this point, Galdes had taken over the housing portfolio, first as a parliamentary secretary in 2017 and, in 2020, as a minister.

He immediately took to the role, launching plans to build new social housing blocks, often with the help of funds from Malta’s controversial golden passports scheme, and restoring others that had fallen into a state of disrepair.

On his watch, the government overhauled Malta’s outdated rent laws, giving the Housing Authority new powers to police the rental market and clamp down on abuse in the rental market, to the dismay of irate landlords.

Other tweaks to Malta’s rent laws followed soon after.

A decades-long dispute over Malta’s anomalous pre-1995 rent laws was finally settled in 2021, albeit at a steep cost to taxpayers, who shelled out €7 million to cover rental increases in 2024 alone.

And the government moved to address reports of overcrowding in rental properties by introducing laws capping the number of tenants in rental accommodation.

Hot water

However, Galdes found himself in hot water on the eve of the 2024 MEP and local council elections, after it emerged that 99 people had switched their address to an as-yet-incomplete social housing block in Siġġiewi.

The case prompted accusations of gerrymandering in the battleground town, with the court later ruling that the residents had been “shamefully manipulated” into signing false declarations. The ruse proved costly for the Labour Party, which lost its control over the Siġġiewi council during that year’s election.

PN delegates holding photos of Roderick Galdes aloft as they celebrated taking back control of the Siġġiewi local council in June 2024. File photo: Chris Sant Fournier

Galdes would again find himself in the spotlight last year, as reports of financial woes at State-owned company Malita Investments emerged.

Malita, which had been moved to Galdes’s portfolio in 2023, was forced to suspend works on several of its flagship social housing projects as a series of unpaid bills piled up, with Galdes accused of meddling with the company and “hobnobbing” with contractors by the company’s former chair, Marlene Mizzi.

Questions over Galdes’s own property portfolio soon emerged.

In November, Times of Malta revealed that Galdes had bought a Gozo penthouse at a bargain basement price of €140,000 from the same contractors that had leased 104 properties to the State through a Housing Authority scheme.

Then, last Sunday, just hours after his resignation, Times of Malta reported that Galdes had caught the eye of Malta’s anti-money laundering watchdog as early as 2021 over links between his brother and a company subcontracted to work on two multimillion-euro social housing projects.

Galdes, who was praised by Prime Minister Robert Abela on Monday for putting “the party and the government before himself”, is likely to lay low as a backbench MP ahead of the upcoming general election, although time will tell what lies in wait for his political future.