A restaurant at the Malta Life Sciences Park operated without a licence for years, paid no rent and carried out renovations without planning permission, the National Audit Office has found.

Zenzero, a restaurant run by Cook & Co Ltd, opened in January 2017 and never obtained a valid MTA licence until it was forced to close in March 2020 as part of Malta’s first COVID-19 lockdown.

At the time of its opening, the restaurant had obtained a temporary three-month licence allowing it to operate as a food establishment until March 2017.

However, the restaurant continued to serve customers for a further three years after this temporary licence expired, without ever being granted a full licence as required by law.

The auditor general’s report places much of the blame at the door of Cook & Co Ltd, highlighting how the company was responsible for obtaining the necessary permits and licences according to the site’s lease agreement.

Nonetheless, the report says there is “an element of concern” in the fact that both MTA and Malta Enterprise knew that the restaurant was unlicensed all along.

Company never viewed property before assuming lease

The issue emerged from an ongoing dispute between Cook & Co Ltd and Malta Digital Hub Ltd, the Malta Enterprise-led body that runs the Malta Life Sciences Park.

In 2016 the company had won a tender to run a restaurant within the park on a site that was previously used as a childcare centre.

In his report, the auditor general highlighted several “shortcomings” in the tender, the most serious of which was the failure to adequately describe the site that was being leased out.

Both the MTA and Malta Enterprise knew the restaurant had no licence, the NAO said. Photo: Google Maps

Malta Enterprise also failed to offer bidders the opportunity to visit the site and see the property they were leasing first-hand. This, the auditor says, “detracted from the transparency of the tendering process”.

Despite having never actually visited the site and only viewing it “from the outside”, Cook & Co took on the lease, only to find that the site was in a worse condition than they expected.

This, they say, means that the agreement was “fraudulent” since the conditions of the site did not match what was described in the tender.

The NAO report says that neither side is blameless, arguing on the one hand that Malta Enterprise had the duty to grant access to the site before the agreement was signed and, on the other, that Cook & Co shouldn’t have entered into the agreement blindly.

Works carried out without a permit

In their submissions to the auditor, Cook & Co argued that they were unable to start operating the restaurant on September 1, 2016, as stipulated in the agreement, because the premises were inadequate and significant works were required to bring them up to scratch.

The auditor notes that when works were eventually carried out, they were done without the necessary planning permits. This, in turn, meant that they were unable to obtain a licence to operate from MTA, since having planning permission in order is a prerequisite for a licence.

Cook & Co also failed to pay rent throughout the years, arguing that it incurred higher costs than expected to fix the site’s “latent defects”. In total, Malta Digital Hub is claiming that they are owed €107,000 in unpaid rental and electricity fees.

Malta Digital Hub eventually filed court action to evict Cook & Co from the premises in late 2020. Meanwhile, Cook & Co, which is owned by Brian Bondin and Joseph Brincat, reported Malta Digital Hub to the Rent Regulation Board, saying that it had breached the terms of the lease agreement.