The pavements are cracked and un­even, there are dog turds and pigeon droppings everywhere, rubbish bags abound, the traffic is hellish, every other corner is a construction site. And property prices and rental fees are going through the roof. Welcome to Sliema – site of the real estate miracle where the property boom defies the laws of logic.

I’ve just read an interview with a Maltese estate agent who is reported as saying that the real estate market is the strongest it has been in 30 years. Properties in Sliema are selling like hotcakes, other areas in the south are going to “explode” and if Gozo gets the green light for an airstrip for private jets, “Gozo will go crazy”. Real estate agents couldn’t be happier – they’re selling pricey real estate and it seems everybody’s gagging for it.

Foreign buyers are shelling out and the money is rolling in. Malta is making a mint and everybody is going to benefit. All that money sloshing around in the Maltese economy has got to be a good thing, right? We’re defying the odds, the economic slowdown and showing the rest of Europe – the world actually – that the Maltese have the Midas touch. I bet poor Alexis Tsipras is wondering how we do it.

But maybe we should take a bit of a reality check here and remember that something that seems to be too good to be true, probably isn’t true.

Let’s have a look at this sudden demand for real estate – expensive real estate – not within the reach of your average non-millionaire first-time buyers. Where is this demand coming from? Jet-setting millionaires who have suddenly chanced upon Malta on a map? Or been won over by its myriad charms after a visit? I don’t know.

I love my country dearly but cannot ignore the fact that its charms are fading fast as it becomes another urbanised, overcrowded bland summer hotspot. Not exactly the exclusive, high-end destination a bona fide millionaire would choose to live in. So what’s the attraction? Who is pouring all this cash into our economy?

Give a guess. Your honest hard-working above-board wage earner? Pious lottery-winners? Saintly heirs? Can you get seriously well-off in any of these ways? It is most unlikely.

The probabilities are (and recent news items point that way too) that a good part of the funny money swirling around in the Maltese economy is coming here by dint of people who want to launder money.

I love my country dearly but cannot ignore the fact that its charms are fading fast as it becomes another urbanised, overcrowded bland summer hotspot

This would be the logical ex­planation for these crazy pro­perty prices. It is what has happened in London where recent investigations have revealed that corrupt officials use London houses as investments for their illicitly acquired gains, often hiding their identities behind layers of offshore companies.

We have the same set-up here, except with less institutional controls and pathetic regulatory safeguards. Rather than rejoi­cing at the sudden real estate boom we should look at the eventual consequences of dirty money having bought up our country.

• I’ve just read a fascinating book by Rana Dasgupta. It’s called Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi and it describes the long-term consequences of the economic boom in Delhi a decade ago. There are eerie similarities between Delhi and Malta, which make the consequences sound even more dire. Dasgupta describes the fallout after the bust that followed the boom.

He wrote: “If we had ever thought that this city could teach the rest of the world something about 21st-century living we were disappointed. The land grabs and corruption-as-usual that be­came so blatant in those later years, the extension of the power of elites at the cost of everyone else, the conversion of all that was slow, intimate and idiosyncratic into the fast, vast and generic – it made it difficult to dream of surprising futures anymore.

“Money ruled this place as it did not even the ‘materialistic’ West, and the new lifestyle that we saw emerging around us was a spiritless, degraded copy of what Western societies had de­veloped: office blocks, apartment blocks, shopping malls and, all around, the millions who never entered any of them, except, perhaps, to sweep the floors.

“The new consumer landscape of designer bars and fashion boutiques, which might have signaled some multifarious capitalist heterogeneity, therefore felt oddly uniform and, indeed, sleazy: just more profits for the same corrupt gang.

“By the end of the decade, many middle-class people began to feel that Delhi was being run as a private racket and with a depressing lack of care for its development. They felt that their own feelings and opinions were entirely irrelevant to Delhi’s evolution.”

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt

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