The architect who has been charged in connection with the collapse of a building that killed Jean-Paul Sofia has been suspended by Infrastructure Malta.
Adriana Zammit was the architect of the building which crumbled on 3 December 2022 in her private capacity, but she is also an employee of Infrastructure Malta.
After she was charged with involuntary homicide last Sunday, she has been suspended on half-pay as per government policy.
Another four persons were charged alongside Zammit. They are developers Kurt Buhagiar and Matthew Schembri and contractors Milomir Jovicevic and Dijana Jovicevic.
A magisterial inquiry which was published by the OPM on Wednesday highlighted several deficiencies that led to the collapse of the building.
Court appointed expert Alex Torpiano said that the main reason for the collapse was the structural design of the building, which failed to consider aspects of wall stability, according to applicable standards, as well as resilience or ties of the structure against the catastrophic collapse in the case of an incident. “The configuration of the walls, big apertures, on two sides, resulted in a lack of structural capacity of the long side wall, that carries the weight on it. The failure to tie changed this failure into a total and catastrophic collapse.”
Workers said that they had never seen a woman on site when they were on the job, implying that they had never met the architect.
At this stage this is not in itself a crime, the magistrate observed. But this fact may possibly be relevant in the future, in the eventuality that a person or persons are confirmed creditors of Zammit in connection with this incident, as from the chats there are indications that Zammit did this to stultify the rights of potential future creditors. So in the future, Zammit’s actions can, if it is the case, be investigated separately, for one to see if they constitute a crime of fraud, the inquiry says.