What’s Robert Abela waiting for?

The mother of Jean Paul Sofia, who died under the rubble of an illegal timber factory, wants to meet Robert Abela.

The prime minister has found time to go to Gozo and get filmed shaking hands, sipping coffee and chatting in a village square. He’s found time for multiple political events. But he hasn’t managed to afford the young man’s grieving mother a few minutes of his time.

Why does Isabelle Bonnici want to meet Abela? To get assurance that justice will be done. Her anxiety stems from Abela’s dismissiveness of her innocent son’s case.

Sofia was killed when an illegal construction collapsed on 3 December 2022. Another five suffered injuries, three life-threatening injuries. Instead of promptly providing information, Abela’s government and his institutions withheld vital information.

It was the persistence of journalists that informed the public about the true magnitude of the disaster. The collapsed factory was being built on government property allocated by Indis Malta Ltd, a government company administering government industrial parks.

That land was given to Matthew Schembri, who commissioned two of his Albanian employees to beat up his ex-wife’s father. The Albanians, according to their lawyer, were living in “pitiful conditions” because Schembri hadn’t paid them for months.

The Shift also revealed that Schembri’s business partner was Kurt Buhagiar, the personal driver of Lands Authority CEO Robert Vella and former driver of Konrad Mizzi’s mate, William Wait.

Buhagiar spent a year in a Ragusa prison for his involvement in human trafficking.

In 2017, Konrad Mizzi recruited him as a WSC fitter.  He was soon transferred to Lands as the CEO’s driver and right-hand man.

Schembri’s company, Whitefrost Co Ltd, an air-conditioning installation company, has been awarded 20 government contracts worth €1.1 million by the government.

The Kordin factory had been under construction for months.  Yet the architect responsible, Adriana Zammit, a former Planning Authority and current full-time Infrastructure Malta employee, hadn’t even submitted the mandatory commencement notice. No clearance was obtained by the architect for the work to start.

What’s even more damning for Abela is that the institutions responsible – the Planning Authority, the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), and the Occupational Health and Safety Authority – hadn’t even noticed that construction had commenced.  Far less did those institutions ensure regulations were being followed.

When the Shift contacted the BCA to enquire about the commencement notice, the BCA refused to reply.  The Planning Authority finally admitted it wasn’t submitted.

Weeks after Sofia’s death, his mother hadn’t even been contacted by the authorities or the building site owner. She’s still waiting to meet the prime minister. Months later, nobody’s been charged.

Six weeks before Sofia’s death,  a building collapsed in Gurgaon, India, killing two labourers. Police charged the building owner and two contractors with culpable homicide the following day.

When a Philadelphia building was brought down by a 42-year-old operating demolition equipment next door, killing six people, he was charged within days.

The owner of a building site and a construction supervisor were charged with involuntary manslaughter just three days after their building collapsed in Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

In July 2022, 20 people were indicted just days after their construction collapsed in Abadan, Iran, causing deaths.

Robert Abela keeps dismissing calls for a public inquiry into the scandalous Kordin collapse, claiming that “if we truly want justice, the institutions should be allowed to work with serenity”. Which institutions?

The BCA, the OHSA, and the Planning Authority, which didn’t even notice construction had started? Those institutions aren’t working in serenity.  They’re just not working.  The only one who thinks they are is Abela.

That factory was being built by Serbian contractors who weren’t even registered.  It’s been over three years since Abela pompously promised in Parliament that the BCA would register all contractors. What is BCA doing?

The BCA awarded former Labour Minister Charles Buhagiar a €20,000 euro direct contract to do the work he was already paid to do as the Building Industry Consultative Council CEO.

BCA awarded his former assistant and ex-Labour candidate Martin Debono three direct orders worth €30,000 euro to do the same work. BCA is doling out hundreds of thousands of our money to Labour insiders while completely failing to protect citizens.

That BCA was set up on the recommendation of an expert panel Abela convened after another innocent life was brutally ended when excavation work brought her house down. Miriam Pace’s death was meant to bring about change.

Abela kept that panel’s report hidden for months. It only saw the light of day in January 2021 after angry demands from Pace’s family to publish it.

The architect eventually found guilty of causing Pace’s death was Abela’s own architect on his Iklin property development.

Abela entered into a business deal with Gilbert Bonnici, managing director of Bonnici group, a construction conglomerate that received millions in direct orders from Labour as well as an unspecified amount of money from Malta Enterprise to fund machinery worth millions at their plant. Abela himself inaugurated his business partner’s new machinery funded by our taxes.

Abela’s architect, responsible for Miriam Pace’s death, just got a fine, changed to a suspended sentence on appeal.

No wonder Abela wants the institutions to work ‘in serenity’. Two years ago, he openly acknowledged “the lack of action in the construction industry”.  He insisted that “today I believe we need to give it a higher priority”.

Today,  people are still dying because of his pathetic inaction against his business partners and their friends.  He’s still trying to buy time for construction magnates.  He’s still being hosted at dinners by Joseph Portelli and co. His Party’s still funded by the construction industry.

We all know what he’s waiting for. For us to forget Miriam Pace. And Jean Paul Sofia, Adrian Muscat, Hayrettin Kok, Luca Curmi, and the unnamed Georgian, Turk, Syrian and Maltese construction workers who all lost their life in 2022 alone.

Meanwhile, his construction buddies keep funding Labour and getting richer while more innocent people die.