Malta is officially one of the two most efficient member states in transposing EU laws.

The European Commission said Malta and Lithuania were the best overall performers among its 27 member states with a transposition deficit of just 0.2 per cent by last November.

The transposition deficit is the number of outstanding directives to be integrated into national law books two years after their publication. According to an agreement reached in 2007, member states are bound to stick to a deficit of not more than one per cent when it comes to transposition of directives.

Until last November, Malta had just three outstanding directives still to be transposed, the best record in the EU and even better than a year before when Malta had already topped the EU's performance rankings.

"Malta deserves praise for its ranking in first position for the third consecutive time," newly-appointed Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier said when presenting the internal market scoreboard, which analyses the performance of member states in adopting EU directives.

The scoreboard also shows that Malta is managing to drastically reduce the number of legal actions started against it by the Commission for wrongly transposing or implementing EU legislations.

While in November 2008 Malta had 40 infringement cases opened against it, the number shrank to 29 by last November.

"We are very satisfied with the overall performance of Malta when it comes to EU law transposition and its record shows that Malta has managed to take the necessary efforts to make sure EU law is correctly transposed and implemented on time. At the end of the day, this means better results for the EU as a whole and more rights for the Maltese people," a Commission spokesman said.

On an EU level, the internal market scoreboard, published every six months, shows that member states have never performed better in writing agreed internal market rules into national law on time but still need to improve the way those rules are applied in practice.

In fact, even though there was a slight reduction in the number of infringement cases, the duration of the proceedings remains too long and member states take on average 18 months to comply with Court of Justice rulings, according to the European Commission.

Italy accounts for most of the open infringement proceedings, followed by Greece and Spain.