Bertrand Spiteri writes:
As inevitable endings always are, that inevitability can never diminish the sadness of the passing of family or friends. Such endings leave a void that words, written or spoken, are unable to fill. Sadly, Sunny Borg’s time came to its end too last week.
Sunny was a self-made man and a humble gentleman who left an indelible mark on many who had the pleasure of knowing him.
Sunny lived his life fully, and some more. A poet once mused that: “Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time; footprints, that perhaps another, sailing over life’s solemn main, a forlorn and shipwrecked brother, seeing, shall take heart again.”
The history of Sunny’s journey, and intrinsically that of his principal business, Bortex, is well documented.
Of note though, is that during a difficult business cycle in the early 1980s, employees were asked to work a three-day week. As Sunny’s son often fondly recalls, Sunny, as always concerned for those who worked with him, promised that should the company’s fortunes turn around, he would repay the workers every cent they would forego. And when things did turn around, Sunny stayed true to his word to those who worked with him.
Once, during an assignment, I had the pleasure of interacting with many of the people who worked with Sunny at Bortex. One sensed the respect for Sunny and observed that employees felt like stakeholders in the business, that they felt it was their business too.
During this journey, Sunny was asked by successive governments to serve on various boards.
He did so without asking for either monetary compensation or political favour; and I was told that he also never held back from saying what he felt needed to be said. For the service he gave his country, Sunny was honoured as a Member of the National Order of Merit in 1996.
I recall that my father [Lino Spiteri], while visiting in the UK shortly after an electoral defeat for his party, confided that although he owed him nothing, Sunny had offered him a consulting position, even though such an offer could have hurt his business interests, the politics at home being what they were at that time. The value of true friendship is when your friends are there for you unconditionally, and Sunny was a true and loyal friend, not just to my father, but also to many others.
Sunny suffered grief too, having lost his beloved wife Lilian at a young age. But together they raised a family, and when I met Sunny alone on a few occasions at his favourite restaurant in London, although normally economical with words of praise, he spoke with immense pride of both his children, Peter and Karen, and of his grandchildren.
Sunny too has now gone, and his loss is theirs, more than any. But they know that although he started his journey with very little, he ended it leaving myriad footprints, having travelled, in his own understated way, a life lived fully.