Yes, the government would need to fork out taxpayers’ money to compensate the ex-NBM shareholders.

However it was also the government which received, in the name of the same taxpayers, all the profits garnered from this “theft” from 1973 right up to the time when the shareholders will get compensated.

As for Ms Micovic, one assumes that she is under no illusions about this present government other than seeing at least a financial rather than a moral or any other form of compensation to enable some form of closure after all these years.

The parties fighting the prolonged case were the National Bank of Malta shareholders and the Government of Malta which lost the case. Bank of Valletta has nothing to do with compensation. It is extraneous to the law suit.

BOV private investors/shareholders are not obliged to give anything. The government should compensate the National Bank shareholders. BOV has nothing to do with this.

National Bank of Malta had so much value, goodwill and assets, those assets should be given back to the shareholders plus accumulated interest and whatever else the court dictates as compensation.

As I said, it is an interesting discussion.

I would argue that what happened was the best course of action, considering the fragile state Malta was in.

Also, Malta was not unique in how it handled the situation. Other countries that had to deal with the same, sometimes worse, situations and who used human rights to validate the country and the New Democratic government, did similar things with similar results.

The Labour Party’s squatting in property requisitioned from Ms Micovic’s family.

You have to wonder at her judgement.

Excellent, Edward.

Those 41 years are laden.

It was not only history made through this criminal act, but futures illicitly planned, lives utterly changed.

Hurt of that magnitude cannot be blown away by a decision of forgiveness made by a third party.

The third party then becomes representative of an acceptance by all that it was actually all right to have walked all over them, snatching what they pleased, in the unacceptable way that they did.

____________

Meritocracy: You send them all packing and issue a clean call, open to all.

Where the focus reverts to votes in considering this:

A fishing industry uses trawler nets not individual fishing rods.

The votes of retained bad apples are tainted. This is not a way to build.

Sawwatni ha nhobbok.

41 years later and with the NBM finally vindicated in court, make no mistake the same socialist party, culpable of that theft, will attempt to make this go away by means of a token monetary compensation and most likely at the tax payer’s expense too.

The reality is that the NBM is now at risk of being sold out by people like Micovic and the like who do not stand for what the NBM was ever about.

If justice were to be seen to be done, the government would be expected to step up and publicly apologise without reservation to all those Maltese families it attacked, also restituting stolen property back to its rightful owners in full, together with monetary compensation for the period in question. Like that will ever happen.

[Daphne – I agree with you, Julian. Milica Micovic should stop focussing on the money, as though that’s all it is about, and seek some expression of regret from the Labour Party which destroyed her family and so many other people besides. Instead all we hear is her carping against the Nationalists, to the great satisfaction of the very people who caused her (and many others) irreparable harm.]

Compensation has to cone out of the tax coffers but not only. It would be a further injustice that the taxpayer alone carries the can.

When Mintoff stole the bank :

1. he “gifted” shares to a few people. This is akin to the receipt of stolen property.

2. The files of a few very significant loans went “missing”. Those loans were never repaid. All at the cost of the NBM shareholders. Empires were built on those loans and a new wealth order loyal to Mintoff was created. Wouldn’t you create an empire if you received the equivalent of over Lm1 million in the 1970s? You don’t need to be that bright to do that. Yet at least one of these entrepreneurs has been awarded a Gieh ir-
Reppublikka.

These should all be made to cough up. otherwise justice here would be half-baked. Though I guess it is a relief that some justice is going to be done.

Luckily I downloaded a hard copy.

Just to jog his memory, his first article apparently written on December 7, 2003 started thus:

“On this day, thirty years ago …”

So he should be the last to comment on the Nationalist Party’s offer of Eur25 million settlement but rather ponder on the irony of Labour stealing and Labour restituting, even if 41 years later, the engineers of the destruction of the National Bank of Malta and the stealing of shareholders’ deposits are either dead or almost there.

The pity is that it is today’s taxpayers who will foot the bill and not Mintoff or his daughters.