Work for first Project Green initiative goes to Labour deputy leader’s firm

Work connected to the first Project Green initiative has been procured by direct order from the office of the Labour Party’s Deputy Leader Daniel Micallef, The Shift can report.

Barely a few weeks after Minister Miriam Dalli launched the new Project Green agency and installed her consultant Steve Ellul as its CEO on a €90,000 salary, the architectural office of Labour Party Deputy Leader Daniel Micallef received the first assignment to prepare plans for an underpass in San Gwann and the creation of a garden above it.

The assignment, part of the agency’s €700 million initiative to create new green spaces in towns and villages, was given by direct order without a competitive call for tenders.

Addressing a recent consultation meeting organised by the San Gwann Local Council and Project Green, X,Y,Z Architecture and Design employee architect Gerald Salerno presented plans commissioned by Project Green and explained how the firm has already started working on detailed studies.

It is not yet known who gave the assignment to X,Y,Z, why a competitive tender had not been made and how much the firm, co-owned by Labour’s deputy leader, will be paid for its services.

Set up in 2013 as soon as Labour was swept to power, X,Y,Z is owned by Daniel Micallef and another two architects, Daniel Camilleri and Janice Fiorentino.

Despite starting out from scratch, the firm has already engaged some 20 employees as the enterprise had grown rapidly, with some help from government direct orders and consultancies that came its way from Ian Borg’s Transport Malta and Infrastructure Malta, among others.

Although still in its early days, Project Green’s first steps already indicate a lack of good governance, transparency, and accountability.

Ellul, a banker with aspirations of becoming a Labour MEP in 2024, was recruited directly by Miriam Dalli, and the agency’s set-up does not include a board of directors as is the norm.

Instead, the CEO has been given absolute power without any form of scrutiny and is directly answerable to the minister, even though the agency will be administering tens of millions of euros of public funds as it sets about implementing its green projects.

So far, no tenders have been issued for any of its planned projects despite the many ideas Ellul is churning out by the day in interviews and television appearances where he is boosting his personal profile.

This has irked incumbent Labour MEPs who are known to have complained to the Prime Minister about the exposure being given to a person who is expected to be a political rival in the near future.

But while Dalli promotes Project Green’s green lung mission, she still defends Lands Minister Silvio Schembri’s controversial decision to put a public green lung in Mellieha up for sale and for development.

The land in question was issued with the intention of it being sold for peanuts to a company directed by Paul Attard of GAP Developments, who is known to be very to Schembri and Prime Minister Robert Abela, and by Paul Vella from Mgarr, known as Tal-Ballut. Both Abela and Dalli have ignored a petition against developing the area.