It is ridiculous to consider the judgment delivered on January 9 as being any sort of justice for the 247 shareholders of the National Bank of Malta.

The case was instituted in 1992 by 49 shareholders – one of three cases in all – and the judge ruled that their constitutional rights were violated when they had been obliged to surrender their shares to the government without compensation.

The next step will be to determine the compensation to be awarded to the shareholders or their heirs.

Even if one assumes that the government will not appeal against the decision and that shareholders will receive full compensation for the value of the assets. Even if the property appreciation, lost dividends and lost equity value are taken into account, it will be scant justice considering the 40 years of despair, frustration and outrage that they have been through, watching their investments stripped away, watching other shareholders reap the rewards of their work, watching their rights get trampled on for complex reasons that former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff has taken to his grave.

The violation of their rights did not end with the 1973 takeover of the bank after a run by depositors. It continued each and every year that the courts put off the case on one pretext or another.

Salt was poured onto the wounds when the Nationalist government privatised the bank in the 1990s without considering settlement of shares to the National Bank shareholders, ignoring an opportunity to partially right the wrong.

As one generation of shareholders handed over to another, the attempt by then minister Austin Gatt, in 2004, to reach an out-of-court settlement of about €20 million – which came to nothing as he would not, could not, put it in writing – must have been another bitter experience.

Even though the value of the few dozen properties taken from shareholders in 1973 was worth many millions, they may have considered this offer merely to get the whole sad affair over and done with.

The stress and anger literally drove some of the shareholders to their grave. The long-established and respected families who set up the banks using their own capital – apart from the noble Scicluna and Tagliaferro families and the Cassar Torregianis about half the shares were in the hands of families from all walks of life – kept the Maltese economy going at a time when the British were losing interest.

They were coerced into giving up their shares and were then too frightened to stand up for their rights except through the courts, which by failing to produce a judgment in all these years, must have let them down.

Who will ever compensate them for that pain and suffering?

The judgment has re-opened a Pandora’s Box that everyone involved has been trying to ignore in the hope that it would simply be forgotten. It has come at a time when Malta is already trying to repair its reputation as a sound jurisdiction for financial services after the embarrassment of the citizenship scheme.

This is no longer a financial or legal issue but a moral one. The time has come to right the wrong soonest for our shame will only be deepened if we have to wait for another court judgment or for frustrated heirs to take the case to the European Court for Human Rights.

The government should not file an appeal but instead settle out of court as soon as possible by transferring some of its shareholding in Bank of Valletta (worth about €100 million) to the National Bank shareholders. There is a lot at stake.