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Matthew Vella
Eddie Fenech Adami had once asked him to resign. Today he is signing the approval for the recognition of the OBE which the Queen of England will bestow on entrepreneur Albert Mizzi.
It may not be such an ironic kink for Fenech Adami. Ten years after angrily calling for his resignation from Air Malta chairman at a PN mass meeting on Palace Square in Valletta, he would be honouring Mizzi with the National Order of Merit.
Mizzi, 78, arguably amongst Malta’s most powerful businessmen, is now an OBE, but attained critical mass long time ago. A confidant to many administrations, HSBC chairman and the guiding light of the MIDI consortium, Mizzi’s accomplishments will be recognised more than fittingly at the upcoming New Year’s list of honours.
To think his OBE has been in the making for probably anything between 12 to 18 months, given the laborious selection process at the British Cabinet’s ceremonial office, you would have to guess somebody was pushing through Mizzi’s nomination amongst the empire’s best right during his involvement in the infamous Dar Malta negotiations.
“Your newspaper thinks I don’t deserve it anyway,” Mizzi tells MaltaToday. And would he know who has been as kind enough to nominate him? “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Mizzi led the Dar Malta negotiations for free, much like his 19-year chairmanship at Air Malta, which he helped set up in 1973, along with other state companies like Sea Malta, Middle Sea Insurance, and Mediterranean Oilfield Services.
Government defended their “solid investment” at Rue Archimede, a Lm9 million asbestos-ridden monolith right across the European Commission in Brussels. Mizzi agreed, but eluded the finger-pointing: “As to whether it is too big or whether Malta should have such an expensive area, that was not my decision,” Mizzi had said. “Whether the country can afford it was not up to me… I just went for the day and did what I was told.”
Cheap talk for such a costly purchase. Harry Vassallo, writing in MaltaToday, was amused by Mizzi’s prized business acumen: “Mizzi has made better investments for himself,” he wrote, referring to Mizzi’s own St Julian’s home, a rent-controlled property whose annual rent was “less than his chauffeur’s salary for a few weeks.”
Like so many wealthy tenants whose lavish properties were rented at a pittance, thanks to the archaic Maltese rent laws, Mizzi’s “rarified eminence in the business world” was the greatest contrast with his tenancy, Vassallo wrote: “a memorable illustration of the absurdity of the present rent law.”
There is little upon which Albert Mizzi has not placed his golden finger upon. He has slogged it all the way since 1946 at the Alf Mizzi & Sons family empire, touching upon the hotel business, manufacturing, import and export, and then going through a myriad of state chairmanships.
Now he joins some 100,000 living OBEs, whose gilt medallion is encircled by the motto ‘For God and the Empire’.
But more than the Empire, it is politicians who need Bertie more than he can ever need them. Even Fenech Adami, his admonishment outside Parliament long forgotten, gave him the helm at Malta Shipbuilding in 1992. A year later, the republic’s National Order of Merit. The colossal respect Mizzi enjoys betrays how his low profile, hidden behind an owlish, bespectacled look of anguish, has indeed dominated the private and public spheres of the last 30 years.
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
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