This is the best time for it but let's see who will accept the challenge.

Unless something happened between my writing and its appearance in public, this is the best time for the country as a whole to confront Prime Minister Robert Abela and the two contestants for the PN leadership.

I dare make it in my name but also in the name of all those who have not given up hope that the rape and pillage of things national is stopped and that what has been taken is retrieved back.

Too much has been taken: it's as if Malta is telling all and sundry to continue taking and pillaging. Come and get it, it seems to be saying. Nothing will happen to you. And you get to enjoy the fruit of what you have taken and you will not be punished. 

Whereas I and all those who agree with me challenge the three leaders to state clearly and without equivocation that they will never condone anyone taking anything that does not come to them by fair means. Especially from the state, the government, the country.

This goes for anything and everything, not just money but also houses, property, even cultural things.

I have heard of the Asset Recovery Bureau and I have taken a cursory look at their website, not that I can say I understood much of it. The bureau seems to be working and retrieving what was taken, though people who ought to know say this is only a drop in the ocean. I understand also there are manning problems and more people need to be recruited.

But my contention is that there are more, far more objects and things that must be got back. There is a whole mess, it appears, in the property sector both as regards houses as well as fields, factories used as stores, etc. The message that must be clear to one and all: this does not belong to you. Give it back and pay a fine. Even a boathouse, a plot for a caravan.

I am saying this because it seems the trend is to pardon and forget everything. That's why it seems the government has come out with a controversial bill in mid-summer that would pardon those who took what is not theirs and let them get off Scot-free. And this would include the small man who opened a window, as the prime minister naively told parliament but also the big contractors who have been breaking the law for ages and expect to get it all free.

What does not belong to you must be given back.

This also goes for all those who have been taking water from the water table for ages.

That's why we have all this deficit and why it keeps growing. For many people Malta is a huge supermarket where everything is free.

Who of these three is ready to commit to a strict, enforceable, regime without time limits and resist being scared off by fake defenders of the small 'miskin' man? And ready to sign a clear and itemized commitment?

This brings me to an issue that I often think about: cultural items that just disappear. Paintings, sculptures, the lot. I once found a man who lived all alone and in great poverty in a house full of antique paintings he claimed to have been made by top artists.  Assuming they were what he said, how did they get to him? And what happens when he dies? 

In my time I have been round antiques dealers who showed a lot of things that must have been from convents and the like.  Is there any supervision? And golden chalices left as inheritance, etc.

I have also heard that many paintings and the like went missing during the war from the Palace etc and are still missing though some people assert they know where they are.

Much, much can be got back with the right no-nonsense approach.

Top of the list, of course, remain the three hospitals sold for a song in the worst crime of the past years and all the money that changed hands in this regard.

History note 

Huseyn Sirdar Tabakoglu on the Malta campaign of 1565 according to Spanish archival documents. Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul.

We are used to think about the Great Siege with Maltese eyes but the documents found in Spanish archives give us a completely different perspective.

It shows how Grand Master de Valette convinced Juan de la Cerda, the Spanish viceroy of Sicily to launch a joint attack on Tripoli in 1560 but this failed and Djerba was chosen as the target and taken. But the Ottoman fleet reached Djerba before the Spanish could escape and registered a major victory.

The Spanish realised the fleet needed to be rebuilt from scratch and from the correspondence between the Spanish captain-general Garcia de Toledo and Felipe II it becomes clear this rebuilding of the fleet was the main reason why the Piccolo Soccorso was almost too late to save Malta.

On the other hand, the Ottoman eagerness to keep the fleet safe led to the decision to attack Fort St Elmo first.