Malta was the only state against a proposed definition of legal gambling at a recent EU meeting because it had seen through the "ulterior motives" of other member states in the use of definitions to keep their monopolies on legal gambling.

Finance Minister Tonio Fenech told Parliament he was answering a supplementary question by opposition MP Alfred Sant on Malta's stand at the meeting attended by Parliamentary Secretary Jason Azzopardi.

Mr Fenech said other EU countries wanted to keep their monopolies on legal gambling and concoct definitions to this end.

The European Court of Justice had recently allowed some restrictions because of money laundering and other illegal activities, but Malta's laws already took care of this.

To Dr Sant's question as to whether Malta's objection to the definition could be a future obstruction to legal gambling, Minister Fenech said the two issues were completely unrelated. Malta had seen through the ulterior motives in certain definitions with many more wide connotations. Some other countries had eventually started to agree with Malta.

Following other questions by Dr Sant, the minister said that although the EU would like Malta and other member states to join the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Malta was not a member but had sometimes participated in the organisation's financial task force meetings. The OECD did not view Malta as a non-cooperative member state.

Minister Fenech disagreed with Dr Sant's contention that remote gaming made up between nine and 10 per cent of Malta's GDP. This was a portion attributable to the whole financial services sector, but remote gaming was still very important on account of employment, revenues and investment.

Dr Sant asked why a macro-economic sector that contributed up to 10 per cent of Malta's GDP could be termed "confidential" when it came to the minister answering some of his parliamentary questions. Mr Fenech said he was not aware of having failed to reply to any such questions. But Dr Sant insisted that he had asked three or four questions over three months to which he had never received a reply.

Mr Fenech said he would look up Dr Sant's claimed unanswered questions and would readily give the information requested, some of which was already well known in that the remote gaming sector accounted for some 5,000 employees with 250 licensed operators.