Service pension anomaly

Both Maria Dolores Spiteri (October 3) and Josephine Cassar Caruana (October 12) deserve to be congratulated and thanked for bringing to the fore again the deviant plight of a substantial number of old service pensioners who, during their working life, not only paid the normal National Insurance subscriptions to the government but who also (some of them) had five per cent deducted compulsorily from their monthly salary to qualify privately for a service pension, a sort of mandatory "second pillar pension scheme".

No one bothered or deigned to answer these two decent correspondents; not even the Minister for Social Solidarity (what solidarity?) or the PN general secretary, Joseph Saliba, whose job it is to see that a PN government honours the PN electoral manifesto.

By withholding a substantial amount from their legitimate entitlement to the two-thirds pension, these forsaken pensioners have been robbed of their rights and have been subsidising the government coffers for the past quarter of a century. In 1997, the short MLP government started to redeem partly the horrible effects of this hideous anomaly but this turned out to be only a flash in the pan. The clause in the Social Security Act that permits the Director of Social Security to make such anomalous deductions, in my opinion, is ultra vires.

Our representatives in Parliament and the five Maltese MEPs should bring up the matter formally in their respective fora in order to have this obnoxious and unconstitutional clause abrogated without further delay. In this instance, the government is blatantly expropriating private property without compensation. Was this enigmatic clause in the Social Security Act the main reason for the government to shelve indefinitely the mandatory second pillar?