Italian lawyer Domenico Pagano, 39 years old, closed up his lawyer’s office in Bari and relocated to Malta.

In Italy, he told Il Fatto Quotidiano, he used to work even in the weekends, his clients did not pay him and his colleagues were as depressed as him.

Now he is happy and says: “I should have moved earlier.” In Malta, he says, he works less and earns double what he used to earn. In Italy, he used to spend the weekend in front of his computer while in Malta the weekend begins on Friday at 4.30pm.

His lifelong dream had been to practice as a lawyer in his native Bari. He had studied in Milan and he refused an enticing offer to practice as a lawyer there, because he wanted to be among his people. But then he found out that the only work open to him was to make photocopies and to carry a satchel without any guarantee he would be paid to do that.

Then, although discouraged by older colleagues with sad eyes, he opened a law office. The first years were good, but then work became scarcer and scarcer. The only clients who paid were the criminals he defended in the criminal courts - those people he dreamt of combatting. In his last year he earned just €4,000. All costs were rising: VAT, the pension fund, and even an annual contribution to a lawyers’ association which never helped him.

He had obtained two Masters in combating money laundering and it was enough to send an email to get accepted by a company in Malta as a senior manager in an international law firm. ”Italians are respected outside Italy as much as they are exploited at home.”

“Here, respect for human capital is decidedly superior to what you get in Italy. Here I work with professional people coming from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, France, Afghanistan and obviously with Maltese. It is a stimulating environment with things we do not even dream of in Italy – such as the annual salary increase, or the possibility of specializing in a sector instead of doing a bit of everything.”