Updated at 2.45pm with Ministry comment
Investigators from anti-money laundering monitoring bodies come to Malta "for a short time" and then get things wrong, Finance Minister Edward Scicluna insisted on Friday morning.
It was therefore up to the government to "tell them they are wrong", Prof. Scicluna added, pointing to Moneyval and other similar bodies as an example.
The Finance Minister made the comments during his opening speech at the start of the 67th Meeting of the Joint Committee for the Prevention of Money Laundering.
Prof. Scicluna took issue with what he said was a certain level "unfairness" that arises from having documents that form part of investigations leaked.
"They come for a short time and they get it wrong but you have to tell them that they are wrong. This is the unfairness of leaking documents at this stage. If a smart guy wants to leak a document at this time, what can you do? We continue making our case because we want to try how the situation is," the minister said.
This is not the first time Prof. Scicluna disputed Malta’s poor showing in a recent evaluation of its anti-money laundering regime, insisting in April that the findings were "leaked" midway through the process.
The Sunday Times of Malta reported in March that Malta had failed the first stage of a Moneyval test, which measures the country’s compliance with principal international standards to counter money laundering, and the effectiveness of their implementation.
In view of this, the government was scrambling to improve its final score before the publication of the finalised report next summer.
Moneyval evaluates countries' anti-money laundering regimes in a series of eight stages and Malta's final evaluation is due out in July.
Moving on to other issues, Prof. Scicluna also told the committee that Malta had started to review its efforts to combat money-laundering and other financial crimes in the late 1990s, even before the island had joined the EU.
Today, he said, the government was still looking at ways to better tackle tax evasion, for instance, something which according to the minister had become "a global issue".
"Today, this is becoming a global issue and we got hit because it is a global issue," he insisted.
On monitoring by the local regulators, Prof. Scicluna said that while it was crucial that there are strengthened, "the regulator cannot do everything and be everywhere".
"I don’t think citizens are upright and go about their business in the legal way because there are the police the down the road. The police are there to deter crime and those who are not upright. It would be a police state if we were to expect every citizen to not be upright. Same with our business," he pointed out.
'Give bodies space to do their work'
In a statement issued through the Department of Information later in the afternoon, Prof. Scicluna said that the gist of the address was that the Maltese regulatory authorities together will be showing the world that, rather than pointing fingers or blaming anybody, they want to look ahead, change and improve their systems and being effective in their AML task.
“The Minister further explained that the evaluation procedures carried out by international organisations such as IMF, FIAP, FATF, Moneyval and the rating agencies allow for a phase where the country being evaluated is given the opportunity to point out any factual errors in a report.
“Some of these errors occur due to the time limitations of the mission doing the evaluation. In any case the organisation will have the last say to accept or refuse changes to the report,” the statement read.
The point made by the Minister, it went on, was that these international organisations should be given the space and allowed to come to their own conclusions, after all the set procedures have been followed, as in fact they are followed in all member countries.