The report on the European Commission’s opening of an infringement procedure against the Maltese government on pensions (December 15) is inaccurate because it refers only to former employees of the British military services (hence the picture of war medals), when, in fact, this Brussels investigation into Maltese pensions was instigated by a petition to the European Parliament by my friend Joseph Caruana (formerly a British civil servant) and by myself (former British NHS medical consultant) and neither of us has anything to do with the military.
What Mr Caruana and I have done is not just for our own possible benefit but for all other Maltese who have been defrauded of their Maltese retirement pension due to them based on their Maltese NI contributions. Maltese who have worked for a significant amount of time in other EU countries, and then returned to work in Malta after 1979, have had their Maltese penision reduced (or almost totally abolished) simply because they have another pension from another EU country.
If I may be permitted to bore readers with some personal information, my Maltese pension for 12 years full-time Maltese public service (more than 10 of which at consultant level) is only about €100 monthly. This is obviously against the spirit of free movement of labour (together with their pensions) within Europe.
Mr Caruana had taken his case to our Social Security Arbiter and Ombudsman but neither of them could change what our parliamentarians had enacted. The only possible solution was the European Parliament – that’s why some of us voted to join the EU, didn’t we?
This form of institutionalised pensions fraud, enacted by parliamentarians in the late 1970s, has been permitted to continue amid long-standing half-hearted admissions of a committed injustice.
The stock answer to why these individuals have not been fully compensated is lack of public funds. But, of course, we do have enough taxpayers’ money to pay for non-means-tested free tertiary education with stipends, free tertiary education for students from other EU countries, free non-means-tested medicines and health services, the very latest Piano-fashion open-air theatre and Parliament building on stilts and, of course, extraordinarily generous (in the Maltese context) pay and pension arrangements for parliamentarians.