The Malta Independent on Sunday

Timmy Gambin: a rounded picture

Up till around a month ago, when the nature of my job changed, I used to make it a point of attending the Mepa board meetings week after week, Thursday after Thursday.

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Sometimes I would be the only one there apart from members of the board and Directorat­e officials. No media, no public. I always found the meetings profoundly interestin­g and I hope I made my reportages an interestin­g read.

If my memory serves me right, Timmy Gambin joined the board after the shake-up of the board following the general election, when the old board headed by Austin Walker was replaced by the present one headed by Vince Cassar.

I do not know about the other government boards as unfortunat­ely these hold their meetings in private, but in my experience the Mepa board has always been a mix of government employees, sympathise­rs, and some others. I would be sincere and call these others ‘token environmen­talists’ who on a normal day would be expected to offer a token resistance but then the majority forces the decision in the way the government wants it.

That is the way it was under the PN and that is the way it is now.

To be fair, I think there have been more times with the present board where the recommenda­tions by the directorat­e were overturned by an ad hoc majority in the board than there were in the, let’s call it, the Walker board.

The present board changed when Mepa became Planning Authority but I do not think anyone noticed. Some members disappeare­d, among them the representa­tive of the Lands Department, even though he still continued attending when he was supposedly sanctioned after the Gaffarena case.

But Timmy Gambin was retained, as was Professor Victor Axiak who had meanwhile been appointed head of the new Environmen­t Authority.

Dr Gambin and Prof. Axiak are two of a kind. They sit together at one end of the oblong table around which the board meets. Theirs is a kindred spirit, perhaps due to their academic background. Certainly, they differ by a mile from the government employees, the party representa­tives, etc that the board is made up of.

There were many times when they joined forces in favour of the environmen­t and even overturned the Di- rectorate’s recommenda­tions. Until the fatal day when the board approved the four Mriehel towers and the Qui-si-Sana one.

Since then they have become persons in the eye of the (national) storm. The whole country now knows that Prof. Axiak was in hospital, that he wrote a sort of opinion and sent this to Dr Gambin, how the latter read the first part in the morning (Mriehel) session but not the second part in the afternoon (TownSquare) one.

Dr Gambin wrote a long note on the matter which was not reproduced in all papers. But in the meantime he became the national scapegoat. If there was anything in his private life that was unknown by the public at large, it has now became common currency – who his relatives are, his brother etc.

To be the centre of national attention is not something to be recommende­d to my worst enemy. All of a sudden your name becomes mud, a thousand posts are dedicated to you and many a time people believe what their political bent tells them.

Whatever happened on that infamous day, and whatever judgement one may pass on Dr Gambin’s actions, my respect for the two remains. They are very valid in their lines of academic study and they are not the government stooges that spin has made them out to be. Nor are they the type of people who can be swayed with money. The many other votes they have cast fully support this.

Many times I reflect that the compositio­n of the authority, according to the blueprint first drawn up by the Nationalis­t government and then copied (sort of) by the present one, is still inadequate to express national oversight on the environmen­t. That is still a work in progress.

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