Editorial • 05 October 2003

This scandal calls for an inquiry

A careful look at the contracts of many of the residences in the upmarket St Julians area better known as ‘The Village’ would take us back to the original owners of the land. That stretch of land in fact belonged to the Pace family, of BICAL fame.
Scouring through the bits of paper of hastily written notes by some of the controllers of the BICAL bank, one easily notes that the land was passed on for a most ridiculous sum to one of Malta’s most well-known entrepreneurs who at the time was more than a simple Mintoffian aficionado. He then resold these lands for a handsome price.
This is only one small piece of the vast empire that belonged to the Pace family.
Such shocking instances exemplify the treatment of the BICAL assets owned by the Pace family: loans issued by controller Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici from BICAL funds which were never paid back by the lucky recipients; the controllers’ insistence over the years to retain defunct companies and yet demanding that these companies be billed and paid from BICAL funds for audit, administrative and tax consultancies.
To just call for an inquiry would not be justice. The BICAL saga is no saga. Indeed it is a scandal.
When we take a close look at the Mid-Med Bank scandal that implicated so many politicians, lawyers and businessmen, we can only say that none of the culprits has ever faced judicial proceeding let alone prison convictions. In the case of BICAL, the two owners, brothers Henry and Cecil Pace, shared no less than 24 years of imprisonment between them.
The fact is that the BICAL bank was in Mintoff’s sight for reasons completely unrelated to upholding the interests of the depositors. Any attempt by Mintoff to convince us of his altruism will fail from the word ‘GO!’
Across the world, other angry young socialist Prime Ministers were busy nationalising private banks in the early 1970s. Not even one post-colonial copycat premier such as Mintoff was in any mood to wait any longer.
Soon after he had dealt with BICAL, he turned to the National Bank of Malta, a bank which we also plan to look into in these columns. The untimely collapse and demise of one of the NboM owners - Frank Cassar Torregiani - after Mintoff’s decision to nationalise the bank, is still fresh in many people’s minds.
Mintoff did not only ruin the lives of dozens of people when it came to private banking. He contrived an operational system that was unjust, cruel and vindictive. The long list of suffering individuals who were physically and morally affected by this systematic behaviour is too long to list here, but it is significant enough to consider suggesting that an effigy of Dom is placed side by side of that Lorry Sant in that morbid Paola square.
Mintoff always chose his lieutenants with extra care. They would have to be blind and loyal.
And in Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici he found the right man. Here was a man who had no idea what business was about, but who quite efficiently managed to dismantle the Pace empire.
In many cases KMB did not even track down payments due from the sale of the assets of the Pace empire.
It is not just a shocking, unbelievable and bewildering tale. It is all the more shocking because even the Nationalist party was a beneficiary when it used the BICAL scandal to pump its campaign machine, only to conveniently forget all these cases and run a mile whenever faced with pleas for some attention.
And yet, the Nationalist party continues to find support from the same people it treats with little or no respect.
There has been much pressures on this newspaper to stop the publication of the BICAL scandal. We have chosen to thrust ahead, and we feel we should go a step further.
In all fairness, we think we should ask for an inquiry into the background to the trial of the Pace brothers. To call on the government to consider this would be a complete waste of time. The Nationalist government has proven that it has no interest in settling history. Neither do we expect Eddie Fenech Adami to mend fences at such a late stage in his long political career.
It therefore falls on the President of the Republic, a symbolic figure but one who is entrusted with safeguarding the constitution, to consider our plea.
The BICAL scandal is not a soap opera but an episode that illustrates the extreme cruelty of the Mintoff years. It is proof that in such times, people do not come together to fight evil, but to take full advantage of the demise of others. The number of individuals who inherited a segment of the Pace business empire for free is also too long to list here.
With this in mind, this newspaper has taken the initiative to call on the President to call for an inquiry.