The National Association of Service Pensioners has had meetings with the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and other senior politicians of both major parties. These meetings have obviously been about the 30-year-old service pension injustice saga and on how a start could be made to resolve it without further delay.

The Labour Party, which was originally responsible for bringing this injustice about, seemed to be under the false impression that the problem of deducting one pension from another involved only those who used to work for the British military.

The injustice, in fact, has been hitting about 6,000 pensioners who changed employment and includes various categories of workers (both private and public) from former hospital consultants to ex-private company employees, such as those of Barclays Bank and Farsons. It is undoubtedly the most shameful injustice of post-colonial Maltese administration.

Both major political parties have recognised this injustice but while the Nationalist Party has produced costings to make a start to its satisfactory and rapid resolution, the Labour Party has offered no costings to resolve this pensions fraud within a reasonable time frame and appears to be set to leave things as they are.

We find Labour’s attitude towards this pension injustice very strange, particularly so since its proposals seem to give priority to VAT refunds on luxury imports (cars) over a 30-year-old State-sponsored pension fraud injustice meted out against some elderly citizens.

Furthermore, excuses of insufficient funds to resolve the service pension injustice are based on ignorance of the facts. Last year, the pension system’s income from NI and State contributions was €54 million in surplus over the contributory benefits and the estimate for this year is a surplus of €78 million. The Pensions Working Group has repeatedly recommended that NI contributions need to be ring-fenced and managed for pensions only – there is nowhere in our social security law that states that a proportion of NI contributions should fund the health service.

The Pensions Working Group has also highlighted the incongruity of legislating new second and third pillar pensions when our social security law of the last 30 years has outlawed them and, thus, sanctioned deduction of second and third pillar pensions from the first pillar two-thirds pension.

This is the crux of the service pension injustice, which still awaits resolution.