The owners of the Captain Morgan boats currently housing around 400 migrants just outside Maltese waters have been chosen to build a hotel for them in the sea.
The Zammit Tabona family, which also owns the Fortina hotel, is currently charging the Malta government several thousands of euros a day to keep migrants on their pleasure boats. The government insists it will keep the migrants there until a solution is agreed with the EU.
“Now that Malta will soon start welcoming tourists again, we’re going to need those boats back. So we have three options of what to do with the immigrants: throw them overboard and let them drown, bring them to Malta, or find some other way to keep them at sea,” Fortina Investment Group CEO Edward Zammit Tabona told Bis-Serjetà.
“Obviously, one of those options would be completely outrageous and unacceptable to Maltese people. So now that we’ve ruled out bringing them to Malta, that leaves letting them drown or alternative maritime accommodation. Letting people drown, no matter how black and poor they are, is considered to be bad PR, so a sea-hotel is the only option,” he added.
The half-star-hotel with 100 rooms will be built on top of Hurd’s Bank, a shallow area off Malta’s east coast, and where the four Captain Morgan boats are currently anchored.
“As you can imagine, building a hotel in the middle of the sea will be astronomically expensive. Before we even start on the actual building, we’ll have to sink a fair bit of concrete into the sea to act as a foundation, so the government will be paying for all that. But as recent weeks have shown, Maltese people don’t really care if the government spends more taxpayers’ money to keep migrants out at sea than it would to house them on land, so there won’t be any issues there.”
Zammit Tabona explained that the hotel would be built by the 80 Turkish workers currently employed by Fortina, who this week claimed they have not been paid for any of their work over the past five months.
“Even though the rooms of the hotel will be quite small and the building perpetually at risk of collapse, migrants will be able to boast that they’re staying at the hotel with arguably the world’s biggest swimming pool,” the CEO added.
When it is finally built, supplies will be transported to the hotel from the jetty which is to be constructed in Balluta Bay, also owned by the Fortina group.
“How can St Julian’s residents complain that we’re ruining their swimming area when we’ll be ferrying food and water to migrants? You’d have to be heartless to do that,” Zammit Tabona said.
