I could not figure out how two lawyers, Owen Bonnici and Deborah Schembri came up with the idea that the Loan Scheme that is being proposed by the Nationalist Party goes against the spirit of the law that Parliament has just passed about party financing. As often happens with lawyers in Malta, they pick a term from the Social Sciences and try to parade it, to defend a fabricated political story.

My experience is showing that this format is adopted by lawyer-politicians from both sides of the political spectrum. Then, to support their claims, they use the term ‘ovvjament” meaning ‘obviously’ in English. Unfortunately, nothing is obvious in history. If things were so obvious, there would not have been a need for litigants to go to court to settle their affairs or for us to debate political positions and initiatives.

Thus, it is not obvious that this Nationalist scheme is going against the spirit of the law of party-financing. On the contrary, in my opinion, it enhances it. The idea behind the concept of the ‘spirit of the law’ is purely French. Therefore, for us to understand its implications, we need first to see it in the background of the French Enlightenment. It was the eighteenth-century French Philosopher Montesquieu who came up with this term, when he wrote a book about it. He departed from the idea of the Christian heritage of Europe and how this was beneficial for the development of Europe itself.

But the abuse of the law by Christianity brought the implementation of the most abominable crimes against humanity. Montesquieu had in mind the Spanish Inquisition and his views about this tribunal were conditioned by Protestant Propaganda, in particular theone printed in England, along the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the perennial wars that France of Louis XIV had,due to the War of Spanish Succession.

I am stating this because France did not experience the whims of the Spanish or Roman Inquisition and the last inquisition that was on French soil was the medieval one. But this is beyond the point here. Montesquieu, like Christ, attacked those individuals from the legal class who became slaves of the law and sought to pick on details and ignored the general framework for which laws were being created in order to serve humanity. Is not what Labour is doing now, in its attack on this NP scheme? Christ himself said that “the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath”. (Mark 2; 27)

This is the impression that Labour is conveying when it attacks the current PN proposal for solving the debt-problems that the party has accumulated with local banks. I will not go into the pressure that the European Central Bank is putting on the local banks, in particular Bank of Valletta, for a number of exposed loans that this bank has been involved. The only guarantee behind these loans is a letter of support from the Government! ECB is stating that this system cannot carry on any longer. Perhaps, the problem that this same bank had recently when it did not sell a financial scheme to the full could be linked to the fact that people are starting to have second thoughts about this bank, due to the fact that it is too exposed to the whims of Government.

But what is of interest here is the fact that banks have not changed their interest rates on loans, which remained around 8 per cent. The irony in all this is that, the banks had these interest rates when they gave 6% interests on fixed savings. The rate of interest on saving has now been decreased to nearly zero while the rates on loans are still high. Therefore, it is a good thing that there are institutions, like the NP that, wittingly or unwittingly, are now challenging this status quo.

Despite Government boosting its success in the economy, our banks are slowly moving towards negative interest on deposited money. Basically, we will be asked to pay the banks for keeping our money. This explains why such schemes are destined to be successful, even if they come from a political party.

Therefore, judging from Labour’s reaction, I can only state that this scheme is a positive one. If Labour wants to discredit such schemes, what it should do is to bring Malta back to the situation where our banks give good interest rates on our savings.

This is why this scheme does not go against the spirit of the law or De l’Esprit des Lois as Montesquieu described it. Montesquieu insists that it is one’s duty to love one’s country. It is one’s duty to work for one’s country or party’s good cause. More importantly, in his book about De l’Esprit des Lois, Montesquieu insists that one needs to introduce fresh air in the realm. But is not this what the Nationalist Party is trying to achieve with this scheme? Is it not this what they intend to do by lessening the amount of compound interest that the Party needs to pay to our local banks? Furthermore, is not this beneficial to our banks, as it deceases their element of risk generated from what is known as PEP or politically exposed persons or organizations, in this case?

The reaction of Labour to this scheme, if it wanted to be credible, should have been similar to the one that Mintoff used in the sixties against the Catholic Church. The Party should have exhorted the public to boycott this scheme. On the contrary, against what the Labour supporters had expected, this scheme appears to have attracted the attention of the public, in particular, the average or middle-class earner, who are seeing in this scheme a means to get a decent interest for their hard-earned money.

It should be remembered that there were individuals, very close to Labour in the past, who had come up with loan schemes, which were very risky and now those individuals who had invested in these schemes are receiving telephone calls telling them that they have lost their investments. Unfortunately, their stories are not discussed in the media. What has been broken here is not the De l’Esprit des Lois but what the French call L’Esprit sur le Lois or “the spirit over the law” as unlike what the General Secretary of the Nationalist Party has done, these poor Labourites were not clearly told about the risks involved behind the investment of their money with one particular financial institution.