The time has come, nay it came decades ago but it has been much delayed, for some much-delayed restitution to people, families and other bodies whose property rights have been unfairly and many times forcefully taken away from them by the successive governments led mostly by Dom Mintoff and his successor.
The hated expropriation procedure, also used by the PN governments, is still there with many properties still in the hands of those who are not the rightful owners. In some cases it is the government itself which occupies the expropriated building, sometimes even with some commercial business on the side. In other cases, as highlighted in a recent court case, the expropriated property has been allowed to degenerate without it being used for any ‘urgent public need’. In other cases, the property is being used for social housing, which is fine, but what about owners’ rights?
In post-communist countries such takeovers have been rectified or at least the owners compensated. In Malta, not all such issues have been compensated. It is high time this problem is addressed.
There are, however, far more victims of the past. A particularly glaring case regards the National Bank of Malta and the shady way in which it was taken over by the Mintoff government.
To quote from a recent blog-post: “Bank of Valletta, based on the ‘illiquid and insolvent’ NBM, in contrast, rapidly progressed and sustained profitability. For, in truth, NBM insolvency was only a fiction drawn up to justify Mintoffian whims.
“The accounts as drawn up in the aftermath of the Mintoff- triggered run on the bank used some very odd accounting practices, e.g. the bank head office at Republic Street, was valued at its initial £(Lm) 11,000 purchase price as a bomb site in the late 1940s, then depreciated over 25 years with no cognisance whatsoever of the building eventually erected on the site - this at a time when a one-room shop a few metres away was leased out at a premium of Lm11,000 over and above a substantial daily rental. This strange form of asset valuation would have been used for the many branch offices owned by NBM island-wide. So far as is known those initial accounts were never subjected to a proper and in-depth audit.
“What is never referred to is the number of businesses and valuable jobs in the private sector that were lost as a result of the forcible take-over of the NBM, and the many lives that were ruined in the process.
“Twenty years on [since 1987] we tax-payers are still footing the bill for the consequences of Mintoff’s blinkered and Luddite ideology, and of the incompetence of his period of governance and those of his chosen successor KMB, …and so will the next two or three generations down the line.”
Despite some glimmers here and there, the full story of the National Bank’s takeover has never been adequately and fully told. Even to tell that is a restitution of sorts.
To quote from the above blog-post again: “Mintoff and his cabinet cronies, and those all the way down to the most minor party officials spent a very great part of the 1970s and early 1980s citing Mintoff’s achievements in setting up Sea Malta, Air Malta, Bank of Valletta, Mid-Med Bank. The truth is, Mintoff had simply taken over stable and well-established businesses at gun-point by resorting to dubious measures [or as Alfred Sant said recently, by using his ‘power of incumbency’].
“Of these:
Sea Malta never managed to attain viability, even after other established shipping lines that had served Malta well had been compelled to cease such services.
“Ditto Air Malta. Its predecessor Malta Airways, and upon whose ground equipment and infrastructure forcibly taken over by Labour government Air Malta was founded, had had its operating licence terminated precisely at the time when it had bought options on 3 of the then newly introduced Trident aircraft and the cancellation of which purchase involved Malta Airways in a significant financial loss.
“In its stead, Air Malta trundled in with obsolescent, fuel-guzzling, Boeings for which Air Pakistan had no further use.
“Mid-Med Bank - based on the assets and goodwill of Barclays DCO who had been subjected by Labour government to an offer that one cannot refuse - had, as one of its main functions, acted as a channel for funnelling millions of Malta Liri from depositor funds to keep the Dockyard and other government-hatched lame ducks artificially alive.
“These worthless loans were not taken over by HSBC and Maltese tax-payers have had to make good for these wasted funds that, including unpaid PAYE and NI dues converted to ‘loans’ at tax-payer expense, in the case of Drydocks alone account for some Lm300,000,000 or 30% odd of the national debt.
“One other significant use of all the above was as a repository for the vote-catching thousands of non-jobs created by the Labour government in the lead-up to the 1987 general election - and the financial consequences of which still burden the tax-payer.”
To which we must add the cases where successive commissions, Ombudsmen, etc have found for the victims but no compensation or restitution has yet been forthcoming.
To which we must also add the various court cases still languishing in the courts after years and years, from BICAL to the Excelsior to whatever else.
All that has been said here today is not aiming to recreate the ‘ghosts of the past’ but a call for a restitution that is still crying out to high heaven to be done, an act of justice that by being continually delayed is effectively justice denied.