Nationalist MEP candidate Peter Agius has reported the developer of the Corradino site that claimed the life of Jean Paul Sofia to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) for alleged fraud of EU funds.
Agius alleges that developer Kurt Buhagiar used €360,000 of EU funds to construct a villa despite having applied for the money to build a goat farm.
The MEP candidate claims that between 2017 and 2022, Buhagiar benefitted from three injections of EU funds which were used to “construct a private residence and ancillary holdings under the guise of a goat farm.”
He said the first application had been for the construction of a goat farm in Naxxar in 2017, a request that netted the developer €150,000. Agius said this was followed up by a grant for upgrades worth €146,000 in 2019 and a further injection of €62,000 three years later to construct a rubble wall around the property.
He also claims that close links between Buhagiar and authorities had allowed the developer to receive the maximum European agricultural funds available that were managed by the Malta Managing Authority.
“While this developer, with good contacts with INDIS, Planning Authority and elsewhere, got the maximum funding in three separate occasions, there are hundreds of applicants who never manage to benefit from any EU funding over years of trying in vain”, Agius said.
“We must fight corruption in new methods, using new tools at our disposal,” the MEP candidate said, adding he had personally investigated the funding applications lodged with the EU and visited the site of the supposed farm in Naxxar.
Stressing that Malta “stands to gain a lot more from tapping into EU opportunities,” Agius emphasised the need to protect the country’s access to European funds by not allowing its reputation to be tarnished through alleged fraudulent applications.
“I will not allow anyone to put EU funding for Malta in peril through fraud. This is why I reported this case to the European Anti-Fraud Office for it to investigate the case and come to the bottom of it,” he said.
“The Sofia inquiry conclusions together with media reports should have been enough for Maltese authorities to investigate. Given that we heard nothing coming from local authorities, I decided to put the case in the lap of the competent authority at the European level.”
Along with fellow Corradino developer Matthew Schembri, Kurt Buhagiar faces criminal charges of involuntary homicide in relation to the collapse of a timber factory development in December 2022 that buried six people and killed 20-year-old Jean Paul Sofia.
Last week, a court expert testifying in the ongoing case against Buhagiar and others involved in the Corradino incident said the factory under construction had collapsed in just “four or five seconds”.
The expert, architecture professor Alex Torpiano, said the slenderness of the development’s longest wall, coupled with the walls not being properly bound together, were the main reasons for the collapse.
Torpiano also described how only one out of the four workers on the site had received training about construction in Malta — which turned out to have lasted just half a day, and on a topic the worker said he couldn’t remember.
The death of Sofia shocked the nation and following a relentless pursuit for justice by his family, led to a public enquiry which found the state responsible for a litany of failures which caused the young man’s death and led to the resignation of several senior officials.
On Thursday, an Opposition motion of no confidence in three ministers linked to the Sofia public inquiry was defeated after government MPs amended the motion to remove all references to political responsibility.
The PN motion had called for the resignation of ministers Silvio Schembri, Miriam Dalli and Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi. All three are or were politically responsible for entities singled out for criticism by an inquiry into the construction site death of Jean Paul Sofia.
