Budget speeches are rarely memorable, except for the yawn-inducing length of time it takes the finance minister to read it. But the drama unfolding behind the scenes – such as the time when the Budget 2005 speech disappeared into the web’s black hole – rarely make the headlines.

Tonio Fenech: Finance Parliamentary Secretary 2004-2008, Finance Minister 2008-2013.

As a 35-year-old accountant entrusted with the country’s first Budget in 2004, Tonio Fenech was raring to go, except nothing could have prepared him for the nail-biting mishap that marked his ‘baptism’.

Still smiling... then PM and finance minister Lawrence Gonzi, left, with his Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech.Still smiling... then PM and finance minister Lawrence Gonzi, left, with his Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech.

Mr Fenech, who was behind nine budgets, now laughs at what happened but he describes the run-up to the Budget 2005 speech as the most tense and certainly the most memorable.

“It was [the Gonzi government’s] first Budget so as you can imagine there was a lot of tension. We were also running late because we had miscalculated how long it would take to write it. We were really down to the wire,” he recalled.

At the time, then prime minister Lawrence Gonzi was finance minister, and Mr Fenech only turned up on his doorstep with the speech literally on the eve of Budget Day.

Dr Gonzi had spent the entire night correcting the document and making it his own, since he was responsible for the finance portfolio at the time.

“I was at his place at about 8am to collect the CD so that we could ensure the figures from the Budget speech and the estimates tallied and vice versa.

“We were still very paranoid it would be leaked so nothing had been e-mailed,” Mr Fenech said.

Lawrence Gonzi and I turned up at the President’s Office for the ceremonial event without a Budget speech in hand

“Lawrence had not slept a wink that night. What he hadn’t realised was that he had opened the file from his e-mail and was saving on temporary memory instead of on his desktop – he lost the entire document which was a huge tome of work.

“Lawrence froze when he went to open the document and realised none of his amendments had been saved.”

It was an awful moment, but thankfully, Dr Gonzi had had the foresight to print the document before it disappeared into the web’s black hole.

“I think we’d have had to postpone the Budget if Lawrence had not printed out a copy,” Mr Fenech said.

A regiment of people was called into the Finance Ministry and everybody was handed a number of pages each and entrusted with furiously retyping the entire speech.

Tradition dictates that before the Budget is read out in Parliament, the finance minister visits the President Office’s to deliver a copy.

“Lawrence and I turned up at the President’s Office for the ceremonial event without a speech in hand. Instead, we presented the Estimates and the Economic Survey,” Mr Fenech said, laughing as he remembered the frenzied moment.

That evening, the police escorted copies of the Budget speech from the Marsa printing press to Parliament just a few minutes shy of 6.30pm. And although it started being read out slightly late, nobody would have ever guessed the drama unfolding behind the scenes.

Luckily, nothing as spectacularly unnerving ever happened again during his tenure, but he smiles when he recalls how one time the fuel tax had increased by 2c, but thanks to a misprint it appeared as a 20c rise in the Budget speech.

“You can imagine the furore that erupted in the House as I tried to shout over their voices that it was a mistake,” he said.

The hardest job was trying to acquiesce to the financial demands of every ministry. “Cruelly, the finance minister has to decide who gets what and it becomes a constant game of lobbying and juggling.”

“I used to enjoy the process, but it’s stressful and cramps your personal life.

“The only holiday I could take was restricted to August,” he said, clearly relishing the fact that he will not be the one in the spotlight tomorrow.

Salvu Gauci: former budgetary affairs director general

Salvu Gauci chatters animatedly and his enthusiasm is so beguiling it is easy to forget he is talking about tedious consolidated funds and financial estimates.

Although he stepped down as director general of the Finance Ministry’s budgetary affairs five years ago, Mr Gauci still spends his Sunday mornings poring over spreadsheets to gauge the country’s financial performance on data from the National Statistics Office.

“It’s an exercise I do for my peace of mind and my family’s,” he says chuckling, as he shares his behind-the-scenes recollections of working with more than 11 finance ministers.

In the last week, humour has always been the team’s only stress buster, so they would insert outrageous sentences in the draft speech, which the finance minister often stumbled upon during the rehearsals.

“We always had a good laugh, and it would also help the minister relax. We also christened every Budget and we’d normally coin a sardonic sonnet or hymn based on the name,” he said, adding that any recollections of these poems would be buried with him.

Their workload stepped up a notch in the 1990s, when a decision was taken to translate the entire Budget documents into English. And the workers had the Times of Malta to thank... or blame.

Mr Gauci, who today works as a consultant with the Electoral Commission, recounted how in those days the newspaper took on the “superhuman” task of translating the entire speech and reproducing it in the paper the next day.

“We felt this was a shortcoming from our side. We also wanted to ensure that whatever was translated captured the spirit of the message. If the Times could do it, so could we,” he said.

Throughout the years, Budget speeches have clinched the prize for tediousness and many joke about the days when MPs and the nation were subjected to unending price fluctuations of corned beef or luncheon meat by a few mils or cents.

But Mr Gauci defended this process and said in those days highlighting such measures was important for households, since it would have an impact on their basic necessities. Plus, he added, finance ministers these days still listed the variations in prices of cigarettes, fuel and alcohol.

“You have to analyse everything in the context that the Budget was delivered in.”

In the past decades the annual Budget preparations were shrouded in secrecy for fear any of the measures would leak out. Mr Gauci recalls spending 36 hours – from Sunday morning until Monday at 6.30pm before the Budget speech is read out – ‘locked’ in the ministry’s offices.

The day would start with Mass for the employees in a makeshift ‘chapel’ at the ministry. And after an eye-watering marathon of comparing figures in the speech and the estimates, Mr Gauci would crash out on the couch. By the end of it they would be so shattered they could barely handle driving back home, so his father would pick him up and take him home.

“If any of the measures were leaked it could lead to commercial abuse, such as hoarding and there was a risk contracts could come to a standstill,” Mr Gauci said.

And if you thought they had some respite in store the next day, think again. “We were back at the office ironing out any misinterpretations and we had to start working on implementing the Budget measures. We’d jokingly say: ‘The honeymoon’s over, the work is about to begin’,” he says.

Over the years some of these tight restrictions have been loosened, replaced with other constraints and demands imposed by the EU to ensure financial discipline across all member states.

What has not changed are the demands the ministry faces from every ministry every year, and Mr Gauci laughed as he remembered how the finance minister was often nicknamed Mr No, as he was expected to double as the prophet Moses and squeeze water out of stone.

The pressure on the rest of the team was equally enormous and they knew never to ask when a job was due. “We all knew the reply would always be – by yesterday.”

Political historian Joseph Pirotta gives a chronological snapshot of the country’s state of affairs, political jostling and backroom intrigue when the financial estimates were being drawn up.

Prof. Joseph PirottaProf. Joseph Pirotta

1928-29

At the time, the Maltese legislature consisted of an Upper House, the Senate, and a Lower House, the Legislative Assembly. In 1927 the Constitutional Party, led by Sir Gerald Strickland, won the election and together with the Labour Party, led by Sir Paul Boffa, governed according to a pre-election compact between the two parties. The government enjoyed a majority in the Legislative Assembly but was in a minority in the Senate.

When the government moved the financial estimates for 1928-29 they were approved by the Lower House but rejected by the Senate. This led to the estimates being bandied from one House to the other.

The votes of the senators representing the clergy were detrimental to the defeat of the government sparking the first politico-religious quarrel. The imposition of mortal sin on anyone voting Constitutional or Labour led to the suspension of the 1930 general election and subsequently of the Constitution. Elections were held in 1932 after the Constitution was amended.

1948-49

Fairly soon after the first Labour administration led by Paul Boffa took office, intense rivalry broke out between two of the most prominent ministers – Dom Mintoff and Arthur Colombo.

This rivalry intensified after Mr Mintoff beat Dr Colombo to the deputy leadership of the party and after he received most of the credit for the work done by a ministerial delegation to London.

Dr Colombo attempted to make up for ground lost during the presentation of the 1948-49 financial estimates. He read the Budget speech entirely in the first person singular in an effort to take the credit for the provisions in the estimates that were in line with the party’s election manifesto. Relations between the two men never recovered.

1950-1951

Following the Labour Party split, Dr Boffa continued to lead a minority government that depended on the support of the Democratic Action Party, the Gozo Party and the Jones Party who between them held nine seats. The government was defeated by 21 votes to 18. The Bulletin reported that the Gozo Party had withheld the support of its three deputies after Dr Boffa refused to employ the person recommended by them as a hospital cook.

1958-59

The preparation of these estimates were caught up in the clash between the Maltese and British governments over the financial aspect of the proposed integration of Malta into UK. With the future of integration in doubt, another clash arose over Malta’s financial estimates. Her Majesty’s Government adamantly refused to contribute more than £5 million but the Maltese government insisted it was not enough. After street demonstrations had broken out the Maltese government resigned.

The 1980s

The Labour government of the time took to giving the financial estimates a twee title. Furthermore, because of the increasing centralisation of the economy and the institution of bulk buying, the financial estimates did not remain the traditional reflection of policy and its effects. Attention rather, was on the small upward or downward price movements of everyday items such bottles of milk and tins of mackerel.

1987

Following the violent incidents at Tal-Barrani, Żejtun, and the murder of Raymond Caruana, a Nationalist Party activist, Opposition leader Eddie Fenech Adami rose in the House to reply to the Finance Minister’s budget speech and declared the Budget as “irrelevant” in the context of the crisis gripping the country.

Later Mr Mintoff intervened to open the way to constitutional amendments that helped to preserve governability and democracy in Malta.

1998

The government led by Alfred Sant introduced a steep hike in water and electricity charges. Mr Mintoff accused the government of having lost its ‘social conscience’ and the behind-the-scenes clash between Dr Sant and Mr Mintoff came out in the open.

Although the Budget was approved, relations between the Prime Minister and the ex-Labour leader continued to publicly deteriorate to the point where Mr Mintoff helped defeat the government.

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