The news this week that PM Abela was on a retainer from the Planning Authority amounting to €17,000 per month compounds what thousands of Maltese have been observing for a while now. The Labour movement, which for most started as a drive to change what was off with Maltese society in 2013, was rapidly hijacked by a gang of champagne socialists hiving off the resources of the country, neglecting the duties which made their call in the first place.

When the Nationalist Party rose to the responsibility of government in the eighties it did so with a resounding call of ‘Xogħol, Ġustizzja, Liberta’. That call was not hollow, in fact we still see it to this day as the starting shot of the transformation of Maltese society into what it is today. That wave of freedom and prosperity is indeed the foundation of our standard of living today. The same cannot be said of Labour’s battle cries for ‘Malta Tagħna Lkoll’ or ‘L-Aqwa Żmien’. In contrast to the PN’s calls, these Labour slogans are now used to mock a reality which is clearly illustrating another picture than living in ‘the best of times’ or in a state where justice and equal opportunity prevail. Direct orders and handpicked contracts are the order of the day, while the best of times turned out to be a choice of shades of grey, with Malta’s Greylisting now leading to an evertighter noose around all business, from import and export to retail to banking, financial services and gaming.

Up until recently, doing business in and with Malta used to be simpler and less costly. We used to pride ourselves with the foreign investor that here in Malta business demands were met with a ‘yes we can’ attitude. In Europe we used to pitch our case with determination for we took the floor from a position of solid moral authority. I remember being involved in negotiations on the gaming sector in Brussels before 2013. Malta was often cornered by bigger Member States, flustered with our ability to attract over 260 gaming operators to establish themselves on our islands. Malta responded with a firm assertion of our rights to enjoy Europe’s freedom of movement. End of story. Now it is a different dynamic. Gaming operators are finding themselves having to defend every single operation under a Maltese licence.

It seems that Government is so weak in its pitch in Brussels that it is not even trying to change the tide in an ongoing legislative negotiation where the European Commission is proposing to include new rules severely limiting Maltese financial services operators to represent several companies and sit in their respective company boards.

Gaming and financial Services are only two sectors out of many where the lack of foresight and judgement of labour in power has led us into a very tight culde-sac. Take the property sector as another case study. The last few years have seen a gradual overload of regulations to make up for the lack of timely measures and the ever-present grey listing. To mention just one aspect, every contract of sale and lease of any property is now subject to a whole series of additional requirements. Sale contracts, for instance, require a due diligence check on every buyer and seller. In the case of sales involving legal entities notaries are now meant to conduct due diligence checks on every director of a given company. None of the additional burdens introduced over the last years are non-sensical in themselves, all can be ascribed to one public need or the other. The discussion we need to have here is how much of this ‘evolution’ was forced on us due to the continuing degradation of Malta’s reputation thanks to the excesses of Labour in Government.

Abela cannot pitch this kind of change as progress, asking for sacrifice and cooperation from the sectors involved while at the same time downplaying his government’s significant tort in leading us there in the first place.

What makes me even more angry is that while operators in so many fields have to contend with a much heavier regulatory burden, the government which imposed it in the first place does not budge a nail to help in the handling. Taking the due diligence obligations as an example, notaries find themselves following several due diligence files, with many paying heftily for external expertise. Government did not invest in a central unit within the public registry to assist with this or to at least pool resources for notaries, and hence, their customers, not to pay time and time again for the same research.

A new PN government led by Bernard Grech would not only see to Malta’s return to the its rightful place: the FATF White List, we would also see to the systematic support for business to handle the grey-list burdens, if not taking them away altogether. Robert Abela cannot fix what his government has so spectacularly broken. Abela and his inner circle of Labour pundits donning the bow-tie at the Film Awards are too comfortable with their snout at the trough to realise that there is a problem in the first place.