Salina Factory Passed Inspection Anyway

That sequence is the story. A dangerous site was not simply missed in the abstract. It was inspected, cleared and allowed to continue.

The inquiry, led by Magistrate Joe Mifsud, found that the factory had been drawing electricity from a nearby farm through an informal arrangement that had lasted 26 years. A sub-meter was used to calculate consumption, and licensee Edmond Saliba paid the farmer for what the factory used. The site, Newsbook reported, had never obtained a compliance certificate for its electricity supply.

The cable was found to have caught fire on 1 June, with the fire then spreading to stored explosives and causing the blasts that razed the factory.

Inspectors, the same report says, had repeatedly failed to flag irregularities on site and continued to renew the facility’s licence. The inquiry questioned how serious shortcomings were not raised during the September 2025 inspection, which instead produced the positive assessment needed for renewal.

That is where the public question sits. Malta can argue for days about fireworks as tradition, identity, festa culture, all the usual island music. But an inspection is not folklore. It is an administrative act with a signature, a consequence and, sometimes, a crater where the consequence lands.

Investigators estimated that the factory was storing between eight and 11 tonnes of explosives at the time of the blast, and much of it was not being stored properly. Explosive material was being kept in structures that should not have been used for storage, including blast walls. The inquiry also found evidence that fireworks were being manufactured in unauthorised parts of the complex.

The language of regulation is often plain to the point of boredom: compliance certificate, positive assessment, licence renewal. It acquires drama only after something catches fire. By then the state has usually moved on to a different tone, one about accountability, prosecutions and lessons. Fair enough. But before any criminal case reaches court, there is already a simpler civic fact here: the system charged with noticing dangerous irregularities did not notice them, or did not act on them.

Newsbook said the inquiry is expected to recommend criminal charges against several individuals. That may answer part of the case. The inspection itself still hangs there, a small official act that made room for the larger disaster.