My girlfriend and I holidayed in Malta for the past two years. We enjoyed the country, its beauty, the people and their warmth. We met many fantastic Maltese. For example, when we were looking for the Neolithic temples, an elderly citizen of Tarxien drove us there in his car and refused any payment.

But we will not come back to this beautiful island. We rented a car for eight days, which already had multiple dents and scratches, but was cheap. The day before our flight home, in the evening, we parked the car not far from the rental office and next morning returned the key.

They refused to examine the car, said “goodbye” and we left. An hour later, they phoned me to say the car had new scratches and they would be charging my credit card €250.

We galloped back to the office and they showed us a fresh long scratch on the right side. But the car had been re-parked in front of the office. One hour had passed between the return of the key and the phone call and God knows what may have happened to the vehicle during that time.

We insisted that we left the car with no new damage but the owner just would not listen.

We understand that, in spite of the friendly ‘I believe you’ nods, we should have made them examine the car and put a note in our document. But we trusted them and we hoped they were honest and decent. We paid a high price.

Unfortunately, we cannot prove our case. We just didn’t think that locals would make fools of us.

We would like to draw the attention of the Maltese to this story and get an answer to the question: does fraudulent business lead to happiness and prosperity?