Recently I was disappointed to discover that some unscrupulous restaurant owners are pocketing a sometimes significant proportion of the tips left by patrons for the service staff.

A number of staff from restaurants and bars with whom I have spoken explained the practice as follows: tips are aggregated by management and a fixed amount given to each member of the service staff for the day’s work with the remainder kept by the management.

In one case, at a busy restaurant in a neighbouring town, the five restaurant staff received a mere €30 split between them. Yet I know that I alone as a single diner contributed six of those euros. The specious reason given by the owner to his staff is that he is “enabling the service which they are giving”.

This makes a nonsense of the tip system. I am tipping the staff, not the owner, whose costs should be built into the menu prices. There may be laws in Malta supposed to prevent this abuse – I do not know – but, if so, they are being ignored and not being enforced.

Quite apart from an exploitation of an underpaid and vulnerable sector of the service industry – the staff to whom I spoke were scared of losing their jobs if they spoke out – it is also cheating the patrons, particularly tourists from countries where such miser­able and sharp practices are discouraged or illegal. Only last week, the UK Business Secretary announced the UK government is to bolster its existing measures to ensure “a fair deal”.

It is impossible for me to gauge how widespread is this Dickensian abuse and I would hope the majority of proprietors are ethical, but the tourist board and legal agencies should move to discourage and actively prevent such abuse by disreputable restaurateurs, while providing a mechanism to enable whistleblowers to report abuses and protect them from retribution.