For the first time since 1987, the Chamber of Commerce has felt the need to devise a plan for the Maltese economy

On 21 July, I received a press release from the Chamber of Commerce, informing me that:

For the first time a business organization will present Government with an economic plan.

Well, I thought…for the first time, a business organisation has needed to, because so many of its members bent over backwards to help elect a party that didn’t have one itself.

And now we have a government without an economic plan, and nobody pauses to remark how very strange it is that the Chamber of Commerce should have spent the last few months busting a gut to devise an economic plan for Malta when we have a new government that should have its own.

The press release continued:

The Malta Chamber has compiled an “Economic Vision for Malta 2014-2020”. The document has been articulated by 20 CEOs who are Chamber members and also by the Rector of the University of Malta.

It was signed off by the president of the Chamber of Commerce, David G. Curmi, who was last seen in public making a total ass of himself sitting next to the prime minister, clearly feeling very important, at a press conference to lend his approval and that of his ‘business organisation’ to the sale of Maltese citizenship for cash.

I must now ask why he has had his ‘business organisation’ write a roadmap for the government when the government is supposed to have had one already.

Today he has had an article about the subject published in Times of Malta (see picture above): Political Courage Needed. I would say that what is needed is not political courage so much as a few brains and a bit of a spine. If the president of the Chamber of Commerce had either of those two things (and political courage besides), he wouldn’t have nailed the Chamber’s flag to the prime minister’s mast on the sale of citizenship for cash. The fall-out for Malta hasn’t been pretty at all.