In Maltese we have a saying “Tħallatx il-ħass mal-….” One must be able to distinguish between one’s apples and one’s pears. This is something our prime minister seems unable to do.
Can one separate the economy from corruption and criminality? This is something one should always be able to do but, each time the issue of cleaning up the entire country from corruption comes up, the prime minister talks about the positive economic successes that happened in the last eight years under the Labour administrations. He does this because there is no ‘ħass’, unless it is cannabis, probably enmeshed in a web of corruption that, had Daphne Caruana Galizia been alive, she would have uncovered for us.
Our lawyer prime minister cannot keep criminality in Malta apart from an economy based on honest work, clean industries and devoid of tax schemes and loopholes which cheat on our European partner countries.
Is it so difficult to make a decent living as a country outside these dark corners of human activity and without scoundrels appearing from under dark stones with cash earned from God knows which activity in Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Jordan, India, Russia or elsewhere, when one can make Malta attractive to reputable international companies with its educated workforce, language skills and EU membership?
Apparently for Labour it is! But, from what I hear coming out of the opposition statements, these too are vague and do not define in clear terms what a new beginning would look like. Ending corruption, an economy to work for all, returning the national wealth: there is no defined plan of which activities will be terminated and which new industries will be attracted to our shores.
Before both our major parties declare their hands, it will be extremely difficult for the population at large to decide. Do we want to continue with the mix of corrupt practices, corrupt investors and local corrupt businesses to grow the economy, destroying Malta’s natural beauty in the process, or to go along a new direction?
Come along Bernard Grech, describe which industries you will attract to Malta, which reforms you will make to the dodgy financial services, gambling, building and passport sale industries, which sales of national assets you will rescind, which secret Panama accounts holders’ names you will make public, which heads of public authorities will be replaced on calls for public applications, how the judiciary will be reformed and what the economy will look like in 10 years’ time.
I have nothing against Socialist governments with a fair distribution of wealth and care for the environment and of justice in society- John Vassallo
To Robert Abela, I suggest he separates the country’s economic success from corruption and purges his party.
After 2011-2012, the Maltese economy grew together with the entire post-recession world economy, boosted also by the new full seven-year budget of the EU. With the world economy recuperating, drop in oil prices, growth of mobility and spending of tourists and EU funding, that those of us who negotiated Malta’s membership of the EU are to be thanked for, in spite of Labour’s opposition, no government of whatever colour would have been able to fail.
Labour was unable to ride this wave of economic growth without becoming excessively greedy and without adding to these two beneficial waves a third wave of corrupt activities that have made many of the party’s sympathisers and businessmen very wealthy but which have damaged Malta’s reputation. This damage will not go over with words alone. We have had a good economy these last eight years and so have most EU countries – most of these without adding a third criminal wave of activities.
Labour, please repair our social souls and you are welcome to be given another mandate to govern. I have nothing against Socialist governments with fair distribution of wealth and care for the environment and of justice in society.
Finally, to both parties: why have Maltese governments ever since self-rule and independence always kowtowed to foreigners and treated them much better than they treat the Maltese?
Our tax system is fatally out of balance, it favours foreigners over locals. Maltese citizens and Maltese companies pay so much more tax per euro earned than foreigners who come to reside or pretend to reside among us or who set up companies, whether real or papier mâché facades for foreign earnings which transit through Malta, making their tax contribution ridiculously low when compared with their own national tax or with Maltese companies carrying out activities in Malta.
I am sure foreign residents pay between one and two per cent tax on their world incomes by living in Malta while a Maltese citizen and resident pays between 25 and 45 per cent.
I am sure many ‘foreign’ companies benefit from a zero to five per cent tax level as against a 21 to 30 per cent corporate tax in the countries where they carry on their activities while Maltese businesses carrying out their activities here in Malta pay between 25 and 30 per cent tax.
Why are we so subservient to foreigners and treat them better than we treat our own? We also go out of our way to thank them for coming, for buying one of the excess of apartments and houses built over the past 20 years, leaving so many of our village core wonderful terraced houses and larger houses to fall into disuse and to look so shabby when they really are beautiful, if restored.
This is our inferiority complex and I challenge our two parties to grow up and to stand firmly in favour first and foremost of our own citizens, ensuring than any visitor or new resident willing to live among us is treated exactly in the same way tax-wise as the Maltese citizens and pay local tax rates on all their world income.
Grow up. Earn a healthy and legal living. The EU funds which are going to flow after the pandemic through the recovery funds will make any government in Malta whatever its colour an economically successful one.
Do we want a corrupt or a clean government? That is the question! The economy will be equally good under either Nationalist or Labour governments in the next decade.
Let us keep apples and pears apart, please and let us stand up on our own two Maltese feet as Dun Karm wrote in his famous poem Għaliex about the disdain the intelligentsia of his time had for the use of the vernacular.
John Vassallo, former ambassador to the EU