Malta gets €2m from Switzerland

Switzerland will transfer €2 million to Malta as part of its contribution towards EU's enlargement.

The transfer will be in addition to the cohesion funds already granted to Malta by the EU to be used on transport and environment projects.

The agreement between Malta and Switzerland for the transfer of funds is expected to be rubber-stamped by the Swiss government in the coming weeks and signed within the next few months. It was given the green light during a meeting of EU ambassadors on Wednesday.

The negotiations with both Switzerland and the EU were headed by Malta's Ambassador to the EU, Richard Cachia Caruana.

Sources close to the European Council told The Times Malta will be receiving a total of 2,994,000 Swiss francs, amounting to about €2 million.

The sources said this is part of the price Switzerland has to pay in order to continue to benefit from the many economic agreements it already has with the EU. All the other new member states will be getting a slice of the pie too.

The sources said that last year some of the old member states were expecting to be given a share of the money too but Switzerland insisted that the funds were reserved for the new member states, deemed as the countries most in need.

Switzerland is also reserving some funds for EU projects deemed to be of high priority. The Swiss Mission to the EU in Brussels said yesterday it was happy with the agreement reached.

"We hope this development will give a push to the ratification of the second set of bilateral accords," spokesman Hanspeter Mock said.

The accords regulate several areas of cooperation with the EU, ranging from trade and tax to police and asylum cooperation.

It is hoped that EU states will ratify the accords between March and May this year.

This is not the first such agreement reached between Malta and a non-EU member. Last year, a similar deal was signed with the three member countries of the European Free Trade Association, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, which made €3.6 million of cohesion funds available to Malta. A call for tenders for the use of these funds has already been issued by the government.