Elderly couples living in rented accomodation are increasingly troubled. They fear that suddenly they will be obliged to pay higher rents after long years during which they got accustomed to a certain level of payment and structured their life finances accordingly. One understands their concerns and one can only agree that they are justified.

But equally justified are the concerns of a substantial number of owners who for a long time have been receiving very small, even derisory, payments for the residential properties they hold. Not all of them are millionaires or capitalists.

It will not be easy to solve this problem if in doing so, the aim will be to avoid creating further injustices that will simply top up on those accumulated over the years.

It’s a tangle from which perhaps even King Solomon would have shied away. What is needed is a long term plan, underwritten by state aid, for rentals to become progressively more aligned with market rates, such that families in rented accomodation will not feel betrayed, while the state ensures that no citizen is left to feel completely abandoned.

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THE CHURCH AND ABUSES

The Catholic Church in Malta which for a long time was considered to be a retrograde institution, more intent on the prerogatives and preferences from which it benefitted than on the social responsibilities it should have assumed, really is showing that at last it has changed. Not on all fronts, but certainly in most areas where it has a significant presence.

In the cases that became public recently about the sexual abuse of minors by clerics and priests, it has transpired that the Church acted fearlessly and without hesitation to place the criminal acts under investigation by the civil authorities. True there were cases that turned out to be time barred. But it transpired that the Church did what it had to do when and as soon as it got to know about the alleged facts.

That is how I understood what happened. Anyway, it is a far cry from how problems would have been managed not so long ago.

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LUXEMBOURG

European newspapers, among which “Le Monde”, have been publishing the results of their investigation about Luxembourg’s financial services. They revealed how many companies are established in Luxembourg without conducting any real activity there... simply, they say, to avoid paying taxes in the countries where they make profits.

We have been listening to the same story played about Malta for quite a while... Apparently Luxembourg has advanced much further along the road down which we have also been accused of driving.

The campaign against countries like ours and Luxembourg’s, which allegedly seek economic growth by helping the rich and the big companies evade paying their due taxes, has been picking up and will continue to do so.

What I still do not understand is why such countries have made practically no effort to demonstrate that valid technical reasons can and do exist – beyond tax avoidance – to justify why companies that operate in a wide range of jurisdictions might find it administratively more convenient to manage their finances centrally from a country with low tax rates.