Disgraceful business

Hardly a day passes when we do not hear or read of a crime committed, minor or otherwise, which does not have as its probable root the use and misuse of illegal drugs. In the majority of cases, the addiction and severe urgent need of the criminal to buy drugs is the cause to commit a criminal offence to try and obtain the necessary cash.

In these type of cases, the court does not always sentence the person to prison time but metes out adequate punishment and, especially, an opportunity for rehabilitation to rid the person of the curse of drug addiction.

However, the real problem lies with those who are the main importers and distributors of these deadly drugs. It would seem that they are totally oblivious of the misery they are causing not just to the addicts but to all around them and, especially, their families.

Do they have an ounce of pity for their victims? If they are actually aware of the consequences, then they must have hearts of stone to choose this disgraceful and condemnable business.

Do these importers and distributors manage to sleep at night?

One thing is for sure, they are the ones who totally deserve the harshest punishment allowed by the law.

Malcolm Lowell – Balzan

Purely from the historical side…

Photo: Jonathan Borg

Totally apart from the currently ongoing conjecturing and writing about the future of HSBC in Malta (one really hopes they will stay for much longer), it bears for people to know the stark historical reality that emerges from any basic reading of what banking historians have always felt and written about this internationally famous group.

Ever since the start of its life in the Far East in 1865, originally as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, this mammoth finance group has always grown following a basic (not necessarily simple) pattern or trajectory. It is, and has always been, constantly on the lookout for buying (and then also divesting from at the right moment) small- to medium-sized banks. And these would have been operating in stable economies (both politically and financially) and which institutions would be able to show solid records of profitability and good governance. Certainly at its advent in Malta, these parameters were here, both in terms of what was the taken-over bank, Mid-Med Bank, and the Maltese general economic and political scenario. As to whether the price at which the Mid-Med Bank sale was effected was correctly reflective of the acquired bank’s real worth, that is another story on which I hold my own personal views.

Where these basic and consistently required attributes were available in Far and/or Middle East, European, North, Central or South American, southern and central African, Australian economies and elsewhere, the group always looked at them with great perspicacity and then moved, in, out of, or distanced itself from, them. And they very, very rarely stayed everywhere for ever.

The advent to Malta was no doubt given a leg-up by local in-betweens who did well from the deal. But even right from the start here there was never really anything to suggest that the tryst would be one, as the bard would say, “where death would [never] draw us apart”.

The main lesson to be learnt, as always, is to be wary of “strangers who cometh with attractive gifts”.

John Consiglio – Birkirkara