Financial services' forefathers

I don't think that the thousands of workers who, going as far back as the early 1800s, worked in Malta's banking and insurance sectors would agree with Lawrence Zammit's assertion (Independence And Our Economy, September 23) that the financial services sector which Malta now has was developed, as he says, "out of nothing".

Indeed, if anything, this sector of today can only be said to have taken its first steps solely on the basis of banking and legal knowledge that was possessed in abundance by early practitioners with a lot of foresight, who were not born or had become professionals in their own right only at independence.

I could rattle out a list of conspicuous Maltese bankers and insurance practitioners of bygone days, but will refrain from doing so lest I leave out several important names.

If, on the other hand, Mr Zammit's view of what we have today - of which I too, like him, am very proud - only goes back as far as the predecessors of today's MFSA, viz the MFSC and MIBA, then all he has to do is to look up the names of key early executives of MIBA and he will easily find that they had in fact been seconded from the ranks of full-time banking professionals who had learnt and plied their financial skills in the "old" (indeed pre-independence!) Maltese financial services institutions.

The MFSA, the Central Bank of Malta and the Malta Stock Exchange of today are all historically the children of individuals from the long past of Malta's financial history and the achievements of these over time were certainly not "nothing". They had already built quite a lot even before independence.