His company worked in Libya only under King Idris, never under Muammar Gaddafi, hence never after 1969.

His business was very badly hit after Dom Mintoff came to power in 1971, largely because the economy ground to a halt, but also because he (my father, that is, not Mintoff) was adamantly opposed to any form of bribery or corruption.

He was also singled out for special ill-treatment by the banks from 1974 onwards, because of his refusal to bribe anyone or take on a Labour ‘friend’ as a silent partner, but also because his father was president of the National Bank of Malta when Mintoff declared war on it and seized it, telling his ignorant supporters that he had set up Bank of Valletta rather than stolen it from its rightful owners.

Not content with this, the General Workers Union decided to perform a pincer movement with the banks, and (in those days you couldn’t make anybody redundant without the union’s permission) refused to allow him to make the necessary lay-offs.

Every week he had to find the money to pay a small army of men for whom there was no work but who couldn’t be laid off. I worked there at the time and sometimes I would forgo my own wages for three or four weeks so that somebody who had small children to support could get his.

So why didn’t they resign, you ask? There were no other jobs to be had – absolutely nothing, the country’s back was broken – and if you resign, as you know, you don’t get the dole.

The myth about my father’s company doing well under Labour – the absolute reverse is true – almost certainly has as its source one Ronnie Pellegrini, Lorry Sant thug extraordinaire. Back when Lorry Sant, as minister of public works, took on as a personal project the conversion of the Knights Hall into the Mediterranean Conference Centre, he couldn’t find a Labour bazuzlu to carry out the lift installation job to the required level and at the required speed. The only company which could do it was my father’s.

One day, while Lorry Sant was screaming and shouting at him and behaving towards him in that way that helped earned Sant a human rights violatiion record, they came to blows. My father flung the keys to his business at Sant and told him to go right ahead and take over, because he’d had enough and he was damned if he was going to be spoken to in that manner.

Sant returned the keys, a third person eventually calmed the situation down, the work went on, and the business struggled along until 1987, when the economy began to do so well that it recovered within two or three years.