THE MARSA JUNCTION: HIDDEN SECRETS

In the 2013-2020 period, €700 million of EU funds were spent by the Maltese government chopping up trees, cementifying precious Maltese open spaces and widening roads, with the declared aim of facilitating traffic flows in Malta.

Cassola’s book reveals the hidden machinations behind one such project, the Marsa Junction, and the financial ‘expectations’ of some of the parties involved in this project.

Local news reports the following:

Arnold Cassola said that the former CEO of Infrastructure Malta Frederick Azzopardi asked murder suspect Yorgen Fenech for “about 45% from €11 million” in connection with the Marsa Junction Project. He said this on the programme Andrew Azzopardi on RTK103, while talking about his new book ‘The Marsa Junction: Hidden Secrets’ where he details corruption related to this project by Yorgen Fenech and Frederick Azzopardi.

The project cost €70 million and was inaugurated last April. The project was co-financed by the European Union (EU). EU funding is given to governments, but it is at the discretion of governments to decide how the money is spent.

He said that the Muscat government decided to dedicate more than 60% of EU funding to the building of roads and flyovers, yet Malta’s population has not benefited from these investments. He said that the current transport strategy is not working because people are still stuck in traffic in various places around the islands, and that widening roads merely shifts bottlenecks further down. Cassola said that postponing a bottleneck by 700m or 1km does not do much to alleviate traffic congestion.

After seeing a set of emails and messages regarding the Marsa Junction Project, he says that he now understands that certain person stood to gain from these projects, and that this is why the government continues to pursue the failed strategy. He said that he received the messages from an anonymous source, which he managed to verify.