Malta’s image tainted by financial sleaze, but government does nothing - Adrian Delia

The government is doing nothing in the light of a series of reports which are indicating that Malta's reputation is being damaged due to shortcomings in the country’s financial sector, Adrian Delia said.

The Nationalist Party leader said that this week’s International Monetary Fund report and the European Commission’s 2019 Country Report served to further show that “the writing is on the wall” and that Malta’s good name is being tarnished.

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Delia, who was giving a short telephone interview on Net FM this morning, said that the European Commission’s report detailed a list of all the issues which the Nationalist Party had been drawing attention to. “Considering that certain problems have been identified, but the government persists in its behaviour, this makes it evident that it is doing so with the aim of damaging the country,” he said.

The IMF report, he said, warned about financials services regulatory systems which haven’t yet been implemented in Malta, such as the fourth anti-money laundering directive. “We know Malta is being tainted with the tag of financial sleaze due to money laundering. Report after report is saying this, but the government doesn’t do anything,” he highlighted.

“Each report is indicating that the writing is on the wall… and Malta’s reputation is slowly getting worse. This can have dire consequences for our financial services industry, which has been so important over the years for Malta.”

Turning to the educational sector, Delia said that, here, as in other areas, the government was not making plans for the future.

He referred to his speech at the Malta Developers’ Association Annual General meeting on Thursday, pointing out that he had here insisted that the government needed to start planning for the long-term, and that everyone present at the meeting had agreed with him. However, the Prime Minister then took to the podium and said that it wasn’t possible to plan very far ahead, Delia noted.

“How can you not plan ahead, when you know schools require maintenance?” Delia emphasised, “The result of not planning is that after permitting everything to collapse, you then realise you have serious problems.”

He stressed that problems in the education sector and a lack of investment in this regard will cause problems in the long run. “If you lose a series of students of a certain age, this will have repercussions… You could either have a brain drain, as happened in the past… or you’ll encounter the phenomenon of early school leavers… Yet Muscat says he cannot plan far ahead. This is worrying.”

Delia also referred to comments he made during the PN’s General Council meetings - which came to an end on Wednesday - about a recently-published Ombudsman report on promotions in the army. He said the people might not have understood the importance of what the report concluded, because it related to an episode which happened a number of years ago after Joseph Muscat was elected to government.

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“The report is very worrying,” he said, “After Labour was elected with a big majority in 2013, the government had no need to take the army under its hands. But this is what it did, the report found. The government decided who would be given which position in the army, and the [Home Affairs] ministry decided which promotions would be given.”

This situation constituted threat to democracy, Delia reiterated. “The army is a structure meant to protect the country, but in Malta it was taken over by the government. In any other Western country, this would lead to resignations, and the people would realise that things are in a very bad state.

In his closing arguments, Delia underscored that the General Council’s theme - “‘Together for our country’ - is not just a slogan. “It reflects the realities which we are coming across when we visit people’s homes. The point of what we are doing, and the idea we want to bring across, is that the country needs to plan for the long-term, but has to be sensitive to people’s current problems, since they require help right now. And we will helping them, even while we are in the Opposition,” he added.