The Planning Authority has opened a second enforcement case over works on protected land in Mtaħleb, where a large plot has been reshaped into a hobby farm despite an earlier case that was already carrying daily fines.
Newsbook reported that the new case, EC/131/26, targets further additions at the back of the property, including the circular rice fields shown in a TVM report about owner Emanuel Peresso’s cultivation project. According to the report, those fields were created after the first enforcement case and extend beyond the area already covered by it.
That matters because this is not a dispute over a shed in an ordinary field. The site sits within an Area of High Landscape Value designated in 1996 and forms part of a Natura 2000 Special Area of Conservation along Malta’s west coast. On paper, that is the planning system’s stronger language: land where changes should face a harder test before stone, soil and planting are moved around.
The first enforcement case, EC/144/23, had already flagged what Newsbook described as extensive illegalities, including landscaping and new structures carried out without a permit or even a planning application. The article says the property, reached from the road down to Miġra l-Ferħa, had been transformed over several years from a site that was part farmland and part open landscape into an extensively landscaped hobby farm.
Protected rural land is often damaged in a quiet way. Not always by a tower or a major road, but by cumulative remodelling: terraces cut, soil shifted, ornamental features added, access improved, the edge between agriculture and private estate blurred until the original ground is hard to read. That appears to be the central problem here. Even where farming is the stated use, large-scale landscaping and the conversion of untouched land can breach rural policy, particularly inside protected designations.
Newsbook also reported that no application has been filed to sanction the illegalities in the 2023 case. Yet the site continued to expand. The Planning Authority’s own 2024 aerial maps, according to the same report, show further land clearing to the southeast of the boundary covered by the latest case, raising the possibility of more enforcement action.
The practical question is whether “enforcement” still means much once a site has already been remade. The 2023 case is said to be accruing daily fines, with a separate cap also possible for breach of notice. But Newsbook noted that fines are capped under current rules and suggested the older case may be nearing its financial limit. If the economics of a protected-site transformation work better than the penalty, a notice becomes less a barrier than a line item.
The authority still has the power to remove illegal works itself and recover the cost from the contravener. That is the part of planning enforcement that changes the ground back, not just the file. In this case, the ground appears to have kept changing long after the first file was opened.
Sophia Borg 
Isla Camilleri