Merely for the sake of historical completeness, there is one little detail that should be added to former finance minister John Dalli’s account (September 22) of how Malta’s financial services centre started.

In his mentioning of those he holds put together the body of 13 new laws (actually the number was closer to 19) that underpinned the setting up of the MFSC (not standing for Mario Felice’s Social Centre, as the joke was then), Dalli totally overlooked the hard spadework done by the EU working committee, which existed at the time, to carry out all the initial studies and comparison of Malta’s financial laws with the EU acquis in the sector as it then stood.

That committee operated under the general aegis of the Central Bank of Malta, with keen and enthusiastic participation in it by high executives from the bank, Joe Borg, from the EU Directorate, and representatives of all the local banks who already had EU desks or apposite officers.

The Central Bank’s archives most probably still have the minutes of that committee’s deliberations and meetings when all Maltese laws affecting the sector were analysed in detail and formal proposals for action to bring them in line with the relative EU rules and regulations were drafted and submitted to the Finance Ministry.

However, beyond the rooms where the committee members met and deliberated, rumours were rampant that anything it would come up with, by way of reports or suggestions, was, on instructions “from higher up”, being put on top of the “to-be-systematically-ignored Cabinet”, pending what the “foreign experts” would say.

Who said that neocolonialism was, even in long years after this country’s independence and perhaps even in our own times too, not being practised?

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.