What was obvious to many of us onlookers years ago has finally happened. It is not surprising that we have been placed on the grey list by the FATF. We have been deathly grey for a long time. I have written innumerable articles about the multitude of reasons why Malta was turning itself into a pariah on the international economic sphere.
Trying to look for culprits is futile because all of the Maltese population is to blame. We have adopted a culture of cheating driven by what I once called ‘criminal energy’, of which we seem to have abundant quantities.
The majority have voted twice for a party that adopted corruption and calculated cheating of other countries by robbing them of their tax revenues as a policy. It started under the previous administration, which discovered special taxation regimes that would attract corporate and private tax evaders to our shores.
It continued with the enormous number of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, contractors and property owners specialising in aiding and abetting retirees, banks and corporate holding companies to move here to avoid paying taxes in their countries and even not paying taxes at rates equivalent to what the Maltese residents themselves paid. Both other EU member states and the honest local population have been robbed of billions. No wonder the EU countries now want to put an end to this.
Furthermore, the Panama and Dubai companies opened by a minister, a chief of staff and businessmen involved in the Electrogas deal and not declared and the opening of a bank that got forcibly closed by the EU watchdog with its chairman running away in the middle of the night on a flight to nowhere were all signs that should not have been ignored.
The murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia and its alleged link to the Electrogas set of scandals which tarred well-known companies like Siemens, Gasan, Apap Bologna and Fenech groups as well as seedy companies and countries like Socar and Azerbaijan should all have sent messages to us the Maltese that everything was wrong.
Yet, we all lived happily in the bubble that we thought would never burst.
Money flowed, flats were built and rented out to fictitious people paying well, jobs in the tax evading and addictive business like gambling were all our youngsters hoped for after a three-year stint at the university and living it up in the summer months with the visiting language school sex and drug-seeking youth from Europe.
Tourists broke all records but were all profits declared by the tour operators, Ryanair, hotel owners? Did they vanish into Panama and other secret accounts that the Swiss Leaks and the Panama Papers disclosed but whose owners’ names were never made known to us?
Our European friends are tired of us stealing from their pockets- John Vassallo
Yes, we, as a people, the police and regulators alike are all guilty.
The only ones who seem to have performed their job descriptions were the ambassadors of the UK, the US, Germany and other EU countries present in Malta. I have called on them time and again in my articles to inform their capitals of what was really happening on the island.
How the mafias of the world have used our gullible or cooperating lawyers and accountants to launder their ill-gained earnings through Malta. How the sales of passports was damaging the safety of Europe, how the breaches of the rule of law were as bad here as in Hungary or Poland.
How their companies, like Siemens, Lufthansa, Playmobil, Ryanair, all betting companies could invest here in spite of all the wrongdoings around them.
I thought I was a Cassandra shouting in vain or a vox clamantis in deserto, but I was wrong. They did their job. They reported back home and now we have the results.
Thank you for punishing us because it may be the only way we may find our way back. To come back, we need to find another economic model.
Setting up a national task force to correct the faults of 30 years is quite a task. Having the villains who caused the problem in the first place to find ways to sweep everything clean is like asking a committee of prison inmates to set the rules for thieves on the outside. What will happen in Malta, I can assure you, is that a batch of politicians, lawyers and accountants will get together to pass laws that, on the façade, satisfy the FATF but simultaneously working out new schemes to enable crooks, mafias, tax evaders and money launderers to return or stay and to continue stealing from the pockets of our EU partners.
Malta never says no to free wheat and that is what the EU funds and borrowings that all the next generation citizens of all member states will have to repay mean for the people of Malta ‒ free money to supplement our budget. But if our budget is mostly made up of the skimming from the wallets of our EU friends already, taking these funds is adding insult to injury.
May I suggest that the task force be made up of experts from the finance and fiscal departments of the countries which voted to greylist us under an independent Maltese chairman, to set out the changes that Malta has to do to return to the fold.
If this is not done, then we may come off the grey list for a short while but will soon fall back in and maybe stay there for a very long time. Cosmetic changes will not suffice. Our European friends are tired of us stealing from their pockets.
John Vassallo, former ambassador to the EU