Amounts of the size you mentioned and even much bigger than that can be transferred on a routine basis. Yes there may be some additional checks that there were not 3 years ago but if the evidence is above board there will be no problem.

Money clears within a few working days if all is in order even for the amount you mentioned. It is possible of course that your particular problem is transferring individual clients’ monies and the evidence to prove its legitimate provenance that you think is solid is not solid at all.

Try transferring US$30,000 from your USD HSBC Malta account to another USD account outside Malta. It will take weeks, or months.

How right you are.

Some people were not content with that, they wanted to impress. So they opened the floodgates to dirty money, sold passports to dodgy characters, embarked on an orgy of corrupt risk-free “private investment” in key sectors of the economy, gave the robber-baron businessmen a free hand to loot, relaxed planning and building regulations to the cowboy construction magnates who backed them blowing up a property price bubble and put every Laburist ahdar and his dog on the public payroll to bring down unemployment. Echoes of Greece and Iceland before the crash.

Now that overdose of steroids has almost killed the goose that used to lay the golden eggs. And still, the rest of the press try to pussyfoot around the mammoth in the room.

You are wrong in your conclusion that what has happened to Maltese banks is the result of what is described in The Economist. It isn’t.

There is a logical fallacy in your conclusions which should have been obvious. The de-risking operation has been going on for years, but – as the source I quote in my story points out – American banks severed their relationship with Maltese banks over the last 12-18 months, with the Bank of Valletta losing JP Morgan and Wells Fargo in this calendar year.

This is because over the last 18 months or so, Malta has become a ‘high risk’ jurisdiction. It was not a high-risk jurisdiction before, which is why the American banks saw no reason to sever their correspondent banking relationships with Maltese banks.

Every Maltese scandal – including banking scandals like those which have affected the Bank of Valletta – is picked up round the world by interested parties and sectors, and those who work on due diligence reports.

Clearly, the government of Malta, in its present incarnation, does not understand this.

They may have different priorities or not understand the gravity of the implications. Financial and business stories have always been a problem in Maltese reporting. Newspapers tend to see them as ‘sector interest’, so a really important story on, for example, the banks, will be stuffed into the business news page when it should more properly be on the front page.