Last week’s summit could very well have been the last one which Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi attended. And if it is, what a way to go out. As a result of his dogged persistence over the past months, when the first session of the EU 2014-2020 budgetary period was held, Malta has been allocated €1,128bn in funding.

In 2005, for the financial period 2007 – 2013, Malta was allocated € 1,185 million which with later additions brought it to more than € 1,300 million. So this time round, the PM managed to secure more funding than it did when it still had Objective One status.

Malta lost that status because with the entrance of poor countries like Romania and Bulgaria, the average moved down. But another reason was that Malta’s economy has meanwhile continued to grow, one of the very few economies in the EU that did so these past years.

The result is that Malta has moved beyond the 75% benchmark of EU average that marks the Objective One status. Actually, it is said that according to figures yet to come out in the next days or weeks, Malta is now over the 80% mark.

But before and at the summit Malta insisted there were special reasons why the funds coming this way could not be cut. First of all, Malta needed help to overcome its insularity according to the Lisbon Treaty.

Secondly, as explained in other articles over the past days, Malta is one island region and cannot thus play around with the Objective One rules as countries with regions can (and do)..

In the Comission proposal of June 2011, Malta’s package amounted to € 715 million as regards to Cohesion Policy and Agriculture, to which ere added € 139 million for Migration and Internal Security, Education and Fisheries and a further € 165 million from the Connecting €ope Facility, R&I and the Environment. Total funding to Malta would have been € 1019 million.

This was cut down to € 941 million by the Cyprus Presidency proposal of November 2012.

Then the Van Rompuy proposal at the November summit gave Malta an added € 200 million bringing the total funding to Malta to € 1,136 million.

On paper this looks better than the final figure obtained yesterday but in another negotiating success, Malta has also obtained to pay a lesser contribution to the EU Budget. It was to have been € 541 million in the June 2011 proposal, was cut to € 515 million in the Cyprus and Van Rompuy proposals and has now been further cut to € 501 million.

As a result, Malta was to have been left with a balance of € 478 million in the June 2011 proposal, would have been left with a € 426 million under the Cyprus government proposal which then became € 621 million after the Van Rompuy proposal. The net balance after the end of yesterday’s summit is € 627. It is for this reason that Malta has now done better than with the Van Rompuy proposal.

In the very last minutes of the long summit, Dr Gonzi obtained a further package for Gozo. Gozo already gets 10% of Cohesion funds, in this case € 78 million. In the last minutes of the discussion, Dr Gonzi obtained for Gozo an additional €32 million for Rural Development. 23% of the agricultural funds coming to Malta now go to Gozo. Gozo will get in all € 110 million, against €84 million in the past financial period. If it was Dr Gonzi’s final summit, he certainly delivered.