Former Office of the Prime Minister Chief of Staff Keith Schembri has categorically denied allegations and insinuations made on a contractual change for the Fortina Hotel which was the subject of an investigation by the National Audit Office.
“I categorically deny the allegations made in today’s Times of Malta and the insinuations contained in the National Audit Office (NAO) report regarding the Fortina transaction,” Schembri said in a statement.
The Times of Malta reported that the NAO had said that Schembri knew of the valuation and was part of efforts to conceal it together with the late Lino Farrugia Sacco, who chaired the Lands Authority’s board of governors.
The NAO report found that the government had pushed through a parliamentary resolution to remove conditions on land acquired by the Fortina Group which saw the private sector entity pay millions less than what an audit firm had valued.
It also found that the audit valuation was kept hidden – meaning that taxpayers were short-changed by €16 million.
But Schembri denied that he had supressed any kind of valuation.
“At no stage did I suppress, authorise, or conceal any valuation. The commissioning of valuations, the negotiation of terms, and the final decision-making were the exclusive responsibility of the Lands Authority and, ultimately, Parliament — not the Office of the Prime Minister,” he said.
“The NAO report itself highlights contradictions in documentation, missing records, and uncertainties as to who had access to particular reports. Importantly, the difference between the €8.1 million and €21 million figures is not a question of suppression but of method: the government’s figure was derived from a 2017 valuation of part of the site, while the NAO relied on 2019 values and included the entire site,” Schembri added.
Against this backdrop, he said that the Times of Malta article “is unfair.”
“It singles me out on the basis of selective and out-of-context observations, rather than on the facts as set out in the NAO’s own report,” Schembri said.