Eleven youth and student organisations, convened by Front Zghazagh ghall-Ambjent (FZA), have today written jointly to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Infrastructure, Planning and Employment calling for Johann Buttigieg’s resignation or removal as head of the Planning Authority, five days after Times of Malta published in full his 2019 exchanges with Yorgen Fenech.

The letter says the exchanges show the head of the planning regulator ”assuring Fenech that he would go into business with him wherever he wished,” discussing Fenech’s own planning matters with him, and ”disclosing information about another developer’s project on the day it came before the Authority’s board. A regulator who offers his partnership to a businessman he was appointed to regulate has shown whom he serves,” the letter states, “and it is not the public.”

The organisations reject the Prime Minister’s position that the messages were already public and reveal nothing new. Only parts of the correspondence were reported in 2021, the letter notes, and the whole of it was published for the first time last week.

In any event, they said, “time does not wash conduct of this kind clean.” On the January 2025 reappointment the letter puts the government to a choice: “If the Government knew, it must explain why it reappointed him. If it did not know enough to judge them, it must explain how he was vetted. There is no third answer.”

“Five days have passed and the Government has said nothing that answers the question in front of it,” said Dr Bernard Galea, Chairperson of Front Zghazagh ghall-Ambjent. “The Prime Minister tells us these messages are old news. If they are, then the Government knew exactly what they contained when it put Mr Buttigieg back in charge of the Planning Authority in January 2025, and it is the reappointment that now needs explaining. Eleven organisations representing students across every faculty have signed this letter, which tells you that this is not a dispute about development. It is about whether public office in this country is held in trust for the people or for the most powerful among them.”

The signatories, writing as organisations of young people who “will live in the buildings this Authority permits, walk the streets it shapes and look out on the land whose development it sanctions,” argue that ”no reform of Malta’s planning laws can succeed while the Authority is led by someone who offered his partnership to a businessman he was supposed to regulate. Serious reform of the planning system begins with the people entrusted to run it.”

The letter concludes: “Mr Buttigieg cannot remain at the head of the Planning Authority, and a Government that leaves him there has made his conduct its own.”

The student organisations are:

Front Zghazagh ghall-Ambjent. (FZA)

Kunsill Studenti Universitarji (KSU)

Studenti Demokristjani Maltin (SDM)

Students for Liberty

Young European Federalists (JEF) Malta

Society for Architecture and Civil Engineering Students (SACES)

Ghaqda Studenti tat-Teologija (GhST)

Earth Systems Association (ESA)

History of Art and Fine Arts Students’ Association (HoASA)

Malta International Relations Students Association (MIRSA)

Classics and Archaeology Students’ Association (CASA).

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