The owners of the building housing the Stella Maris band club in Sliema were awarded €1.1m in compensation after a civil court found that decades of artificially low rent breached their rights.
The case is the latest development in a long-running legal battle over the prime property in Sliema’s Annunciation Square.
The Stella Maris Band Club has occupied the building since the 1920s, formalizing its lease in September 1959 at an annual rent of Lm150 (€350)—a figure that remained unchanged for over 60 years due to Malta’s strict rent control laws.
In 2008, the building’s owners, who held the premises under a temporary emphyteusis dating back to 1876 and set to expire in 2026, filed an eviction lawsuit. They argued that unauthorised structural alterations were in breach of the lease terms.
Almost a decade later, in 2017, the rent regulation board ruled against the owners, but this decision was overturned on appeal the following year.
By then, however, new 2018 amendments to Malta’s rent laws granted band clubs additional legal protection, effectively blocking eviction efforts even in cases of lease violations.
The case was later referred to the Constitutional Court, which in 2018 found that the changes to the rent laws restricted the owners’ property rights and violated their rights.
The decision was confirmed on appeal in 2022, effectively handing the property back to the owners after a 14-year legal battle.
But just hours before the eviction was set to take effect in November 2022, the government stepped in to save the band club, paying €450,000 to buy out the remaining three years of the property's emphyteusis.
And on Tuesday, judge Ian Spiteri Bailey found that the rent paid by the band club, which had remained unchanged since 1959, was substantially below market value and placed an unfair burden on the owners.
The court assessed the market rental value of the property from 1987 to 2022, calculating a total lost income of €2.63 million.
However, after adjustments—including a 5% reduction for potential improvements the owners could have made and a 10% deduction for unauthorized modifications carried out by the Band Club—the final compensation amount was set at €1,112,385, to be paid by the State and split among the 13 owners.