Updated 2.15pm

Former President and Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami celebrated turning 90 on Wednesday as he greeted Opposition leader Bernard Grech and former colleagues at his Birkirkara home.

Fenech Adami has kept a very low profile since retiring from public life in 2009.

Grech led a group of visitors who included former prime minister Lawrence Gonzi, PN officials and former Fenech Adami Cabinet colleagues. He thanked Fenech Adami for his work in transforming Malta for the better, despite many difficulties and challenges which also impacted his family.  

A lawyer by profession with deep religious convictions, Fenech Adami became leader of the Nationalist Party in 1977, succeeding George Borg Olivier.

Fenech Adami’s house was ransacked and his wife was assaulted by Labour supporters in 1979.

In the first general election under his leadership, in 1981, the PN won a majority of votes but a minority of parliamentary seats and was unable to form a government.

Eddie Fenech Adami with former US president George Bush.

The PN was elected to government in 1987 and Fenech Adami launched sweeping free-market reforms and initiated the process for Malta to join the European Union. The process continued after the PN won the 1992 general election but the introduction of VAT and other reforms cost it the 1996 election.  

New Prime Minister Alfred Sant ‘froze’ Malta’s bid for EU membership but his Labour government collapsed in 1998 and Fenech Adami was returned to Castille, where he reactivated the EU application, negotiated the terms for Malta’s membership and put the package to a vote at a referendum which he won in March 2003.

The 'yes' vote was confirmed in a general election a month later and Fenech Adami formally signed Malta’s EU accession treaty in Athens within hours of the election result being announced, crowning his political career.

He stepped down in February 2004 and was controversially subsequently appointed president, the first person to have held the offices of prime minister and president.

His birthday is to be celebrated by the Nationalist Party with a fund-raising campaign on Wednesday. 

Eddie Fenech Adami looking at a copy of Times of Malta.