The article ‘Taking finance to the wire’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, Insurance & Finance supplement, December 1) dwells at length in its initial part about the Nathan Rothschild, General Wellington and the 1815 Battle of Waterloo nexus. I strongly feel, however, that the Maltese element in that story should also be given right – and pride – of place.

By the end of 1813, Rotschild was certainly discounting Wellington’s bills of exchange in London, and indeed he may well have been doing it even before then. Ever since 1809, Wellington had been complaining of an acute shortage of cash to pay his troops, and according to Derek Wilson in his study Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power, Wellington had been obliged to borrow at exhorbitant rates from Maltese and Spanish bankers.

In my book The History of Maltese Banking (Progress Press, 2006) the point is made that Rothschild was close to Metterlinch, and that one cannot rule out that agents who were duly informed of Wellington’s financial predicaments, and Maltese and Sicilian bankers’ readiness to play a financing role, would have used such awareness to the Rothschilds’ benefit.

Miguel Lopez-Morell (from the Universidad De Murcia, Spain) also holds that the Spanish arm of the Rothschilds – the way that family’s founder Mayer Amschel craftily placed all his sons in different ‘Rothschilds’ all over a constantly internally feuding Europe – had, in fact, also financed Wellington before Waterloo.