Mepa today sanctioned the façade of the Mita building in Sta Venera but slapped the heaviest fine it could impose on the government's IT agency - €2,300 - for having carried out works without a permit.
Five of the board's 12 members voted against the decision.
However a majority rejected a proposed - backed by Labour MP Roderick Galdes - to impose a €50,000 planning gain fine - a levy which compensates the community for a development’s impact on it.
During the discussion, Mepa enforcement officers reported that since the last Mepa hearing on the matter, remedial action had been taken by Mepa, which had reduced protruding parts of the façade to an acceptable 15cm, except for a small part which was at 16.5cm.
At its last meeting, earlier this month, the board had decided to defer the decision on the building pending the report from the enforcement directorate to establish whether the façade protruded 20cm beyond the official building line.
The board also chastised Mita for having gone ahead with a fresh version of the façade despite not yet having the necessary planning permission. As a government agency, it said, it should have set an example and not broken planning laws.
Mita's chairman, Claudio Grech, while admitting that the façade had been changed while the planning permit was still pending, had said that doing so was “logical” and in the public interest, given the repercussions of halting works.
Mita applied for planning permission for the façade last May, but the permit had still not been issued by September, when the work was taken in hand.
“Despite striving hard to convince the respective authorities to accelerate the issuance of the permit, Mita was constrained to close off the site before the inclement weather could prevail,” Mr Grech explained.
Had Mita not forged ahead with works and instead waited for Mepa to issue the necessary permit, Mr Grech said, it would have had to postpone the relocation of some of its servers from Gattard House in Blata l-Bajda.
As a result, the e-Learning Solution for all primary and secondary schools and the National Certification Authority infrastructure “would not have been implemented, with the obvious negative consequences,” Mr Grech continued.