At the end of November, less than a week before Jean Paul Sofia was killed in the collapse of an industrial building in Corradino, Justice Minister Jonathan Attard presented some shocking figures in parliament.

Public opinion, however, was looking elsewhere: as the debate about the ‘value of life’ raged on, the construction industry capped off a busy year of deaths, injuries and silence with another victim.

Last year, 12 people never returned home from work. Most of these died on building sites but Attard didn’t break the figures down: muddying the numbers is convenient for those who’d rather not quantify the real extent of a problem, more so when it’s caused by the hand that feeds.

Almost two-thirds of these inquiries have yet to be closed. The justice minister also stopped short of giving any statistics about how many people have been charged in court over construction deaths, saying it would be “too much work” for the authorities to collect this data.

While we await the NSO’s chilling verdicts, we know workplace deaths have increased from seven to nine to 12 in the last two years. Chronicling the industry’s cost of life without the clinical use of numbers is impossible and it doesn’t deter the high priests’ thirst for sacrifices on the altar of economic growth.

In the last two years, the change of guard at the top of the MDA has seen increased calls for “reduced bureaucracy” during the numerous meetings where it’s afforded the honour of meeting the Castille Dream Team, a delegation composed of Robert Abela and his finest men (and one woman).

Much cud has been chewed between these two sides, de facto owners of the country. Politics and private interests have a history of converging dangerously and construction – where no questions about source of wealth are ever asked – is an ideal playground. There is no attempt to hide the camaraderie either. The admissions from industry honchos about donations to political parties may only have been shocking for their frankness; but there’s a lesson about free lunches there somewhere.

A regular member of this round table of Nobel prizes is Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi, keeper of the newly-created planning ministry, a veritable pot of career kryptonite. Prior to his appointment, the ever-grinning Zrinzo Azzopardi kept relatively free of blushes and scandals and, since March, he’s shown all the drive of a marshmallow in mid-ocean.

The Corradino building that collapsed, taking Jean Paul Sofia's life with it. Photo: Jonathan Borg

Maybe it’s what Abela expects out of him. Despite weekly tales of grotesque favouritism towards developers and a few daylight robberies such as the Sannat permit, we have yet to hear of PA cheeses being investigated or suspended for their role in the numerous breaches of the same policies and procedures they are meant to protect and follow. CEO Martin Saliba has finally been replaced by Oliver Magro but that’s just the prime minister shifting his expensive furniture around.

Zrinzo Azzopardi is also responsible for the relatively new Building and Construction Authority, set up after another collapse took the life of Miriam Pace in 2020. An authority to regulate the wild west was badly needed but, two years after its inception, it’s become another semi-conscious, toothless body willing to prostitute itself to business.

Right after the election, Castille lit a flare for its chums and installed architect Maria Schembri Grima, who roughly handles a third of Joseph Portelli’s applications, as the authority’s chair. Her deputy is Ian Borg, an OPM advisor.

Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi has shown all the drive of a marshmallow in mid-ocean- Wayne Flask

Zrinzo Azzopardi was also part of the parliamentary committee discussing the establishment of the authority in March 2021. Also at the table was architect and lawyer Robert Musumeci, somehow still in the fold after his disastrous 2019 ‘reform’, written and published in a week after three apartment blocks collapsed that summer.

The net result was a spike in construction deaths over the last three years. It would be tempting to put this down to incompetence but it’s only natural to question the integrity of laws written by a top dog who represents developers, often seeking a way around them.

Over Christmas, Zrinzo Azzopardi would pay a long overdue visit to Sofia’s family. It’s how politicians feign interest in taking action whenever the “noise in the media” gets too much for them and for the developers: after this umpteenth death, you’d expect to see a crackdown on building sites across Malta, involving fines and arrests.

Jean Paul’s mother said the authorities have left the family on their own, which is what families of other construction victims have stated in private; from law enforcement to politics, their right to justice and closure is met with silence and apathy.

Zrinzo Azzopardi’s visit came a week after the BCA introduced “new regulations” via a legal notice, which citizens often don’t know about, let alone be able to challenge. The devil, as ever, is in the detail. While the new regulations essentially introduce a few cosmetic obligations on contractors and some provisions to mitigate dust, there’s a sneaky bonus for the boys: works which cannot be heard from outside the site boundary can start even before 7am.

It may not be the dirtiest loophole in Labour’s patchy tapestry of laws but, if anything, it’s a display of how stealthy measures put developers and contractors before residents.

Developer Michael Stivala, from the comfort of another radio interview, recently said that regulating construction means increasing property prices, a polite way of saying that profit margins are more valuable than life.

Zrinzo Azzopardi, unlike most of us, is a politician with the privilege of choice. It’s his responsibility to do his job and avoid more deaths in the industry.

But if Stivala’s bell rings louder, Zrinzo Azzopardi can persist in the grin-and-wave routine his colleagues have perfected, choosing to become another accomplice to the bloodied altar of economic growth and its greedy head priests.