I have followed with great interest the current debate about what the French did – or did not do – in terms of respect towards what the Maltese and their institutions (including the Church) owned during their occupation of Malta, and just before they left.

But the whole debate still leaves me with a level of disappointment in terms of an issue I have been grappling with for many years, namely what were the banking or financial arrangements existing in Malta at the time?

In pure banking institutional terms, my long research has failed to unearth the name of one single bank existing and operating in Malta between, say, 1795 and 1800. And yet there is an important reference to “public banks” in a long letter of appeal for help which, during the historic insurrection of the Maltese, was written by the Maltese Council (elected by the local nobility to represent the Maltese besiegers) to Ferdinand IV, King of Naples and Sicily.

In his The Sovereignty of Malta Sir Augustus Bartolo quotes this letter, which is inclusive of a long appeal about the dire economic conditions under which the Maltese besiegers were living, and which includes the following passage:

“We have further to represent that while the funds appertaining to the Università [which Testa holds was the Università dei Grani], the public banks as well as those which belong to the wealthy classes, are to be found in the city now occupied by our enemies, the country is thus deprived of the means of subsistence.”

That reference to public banks, and as holders of the people’s and institutions’ funds, is still unclear to this day. What and which were these “banks”?

Testa, Hubert Bonin (in Paris), Charles Xuereb and others have been, along with me, unable to come up with any institutional names. And it seems as if the closest interpretation of that word ‘bank’ must still be Testa’s, namely that the “public banks” were in fact the three branches of the Università dei Grani operating from Valletta, Mdina and Gozo.

Other than references to some similar-to-banking functions that the Florentine Lorenzo Fontani executed – and endless indeed are the stories about his sort of ‘fifth columnist’ role, for the French, from his time under de Rohan and then being retained by the French to carry on with the retained massa frumentaria fund – nobody has really come up with detailed, supported evidence of what was the real banking (institutional) situation in Malta under the French.

It is a historical gap which we still have to work hard on, and it is a pity that Xuereb may have missed the opportunity to help plug this gap.