It was Mintoff and his Labour government which seized the National Bank, not the Nationalist Party/government
I am really sick to the gills of the way Malta Today, the Labour Party/government and shareholder-heir Milica Micovic are seeking to the present the National Bank situation as being somehow the Nationalist Party’s fault or that of the governments led by Fenech Adami and Gonzi. True, you would have expected the incoming Nationalist government in 1987 to have made a priority of reducing this major and inhuman injustice, and you would have expected them, too, not to use the fact that the matter was in court as an excuse to hold off from reaching some kind of compensation settlement.
But then you would have expected, too, that the courts wouldn’t have dragged their feet on the matter, pronouncing judgement (and a good judgement indeed) 40 years after the event. Fortunately that judgement was confirmed by the Appeals Court in relatively record time.
The fact of the matter is that the catastrophe, which destroyed so many lives and not only financially (and no amount of money can make up for that), was engineered by the Labour Party in government. For the Labour Party to now blame the PN for not doing anything about it is offensive in the extreme.
For Malta Today to jump on that bandwagon and talk as though the blame lies with the outgoing Nationalist government for offering a too-small compensation package before the election, rather than with the Labour Party for literally stealing an entire bank so as to gain full control of the economy, is farcical.
After all, it was Malta Today itself, in its early incarnation as a proper newspaper, which carried a series of well-researched feature-reports about what happened in December 1973.
I didn’t need to read them (though I did) because I lived through it with my entire family, as did Miss Micovic, and I am very clear in my mind as to who was responsible, what the motivation was, and whether I am going to give those people the time of day.
Now all Joseph Muscat’s government has to do is find the compensation money from other people’s pockets – not out of the goodness of his heart or because he gives a damn about the shareholders or their heirs (after all, his family are rabid Mintoff worshippers and he would probably have done the same thing at the time), but because he is forced to do so by the ruling of the court.
And no doubt, one or two of the less bright shareholder-heirs will be stupid enough to be grateful to Labour for using other people’s money to compensate them for the very bank it stole from their parents and grandparents 41 years ago.
Bank of Valletta will continue to continue to be owned by others and those others will continue to profit off it, the money to compensate shareholders will be found by the government from taxes, and nothing will bring back those 41 years.
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http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/1000000222/tonio_fenechs_25_million_offer_came_five_days_before_voting_day#.VE-3mWchNCw
Amen.
‘…and you would have expected them, too, not to use the fact that the matter was in court as an excuse to hold off from reaching some kind of compensation settlement…’
Even more so when government becomes a juridical entity empowered with every legal instrument designed specifically to unbalance justice towards the ‘common good’.
And that’s various proklami presidenzjali overriding courts of law, more terms and conditions which only seasoned lawyers can understand and an incredibly one sided process of compensation with every civil servant performing their utmost duty to keep Joe Public’s material rights at bay.
And that includes, no answer, months reserved ad nauseum the inverse for one’s reply or whatever it is one’s required to produce and so on.
Time to kick off the real paradigm shift this place needs; the eradication of all ramifications and fine print inscribed into our laws resulting from feudal and perhaps colonial designs.
And it won’t be Labour.
And it should be noted that the shareholders only commenced proceedings after 1987 and after the fall of Mintoff and Labour. That says volumes.
When a country experiences an autocratic leader, and a human rights violating government, things are never clear cut as to what to do once that regime ends.
Any new government is faced with many difficult choices, the ramifications of which could either usher in a more democratic and peaceful nation, or throw any hopes of such nation out the window and send the country barrelling into more conflict and chaos. It has happened before, and can happen again.
The first of these problems is to figure out which laws introduced by the previous autocratic regime should be kept, which should be discarded and which should be kept but amended to suit the countriy’s new direction. In some cases it is easy to decide which laws to do away with since they are clearly discriminatory. Others perhaps not so much. However a reluctance to not do anything that might be interpreted as condoning the previous government’s behaviour gets in the way. A law might be a good thing, but does keeping it mean we approve of that government? Will people take it as a sign that actually the previous government was ok if we keep it?
This is because any new government coming into power in such a context often uses human rights as a way of legitimising themselves, preaching justice and also unity within the nation.
The Nationalists were no different. They promoted a civic nationalism, uniting the country through a common appreciation of Human Rights.
But the difficult choices keep on coming. When it comes to appointing certain people to certain positions, what should a new government do? Do you keep those who were appointed by a corrupt and autocratic PM? Do you send them all packing and replace them with your choice of people, in effect behaving like the very autocratic government you claim to be against? Or do you try and strike a happy inbetween?
There clearly is no correct answer. But the main motivation must be to keep as much calm as possible.
Then there is the problem of compensation and justice. Many people will have suffered human rights abuses, but justice becomes harder to define when after the main transgression of an abusive PM means everyone has to defend themselves in some way, when no trust in the police force legitimises taking the law into your own hands and in doing so committing crimes yourself. As many labour members will say,” Even the nationalists did bad thing” , glossing over that the main and initial transgressors were the people in the Labour Party, and Mintoff especially.
Also, the sheer number of people in need of compensation is so big, compensating them would cost the state too much, sending the state into bankruptcy.
Like other countries, the PN government chose the route of reconciliation and forgiveness. It seemed the best course of action at a time when Malta was teetered on the brink of civil war. However, like in other countries, those who were wronged did not necessarily go along with this “forgive and forget” idea, feeling like their suffering meant nothing to the country. Also, as we can see here in Malta today, it gives supporters of the human rights violating party the argument “If they were so bad, why didn’t they go to prison?”.
Their juvenile self serving logic knows no shame or gratitude. The very thing that kept their heroes out of prison, has now bitten the country in the backside. The PL should be more careful, and less disingenuous.
The debate of what Malta should have done is a worthy one to have, especially in light of the PL’s attitude towards the forgiveness shown by the Nationalist Government, which is the main reason why it is still here today.
We should have this debate more often, at university, on TV, in the press. Only by discussing the issue can we, the Maltese, be able to hold our politicians to a standard nationally agreed upon.
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.
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.
This line of MaltaToday (i.e. blaming the Nationalists for offering a deal too late in the day) is being pushed by Kitten on Facebook in the context of the reaction to last weekend’s convention, and how the PN will never change.
Change into what? His image or his personal toy?
BoV should cough up the money. Fullstop.
Matthew Vella should have searched MaltaToday’s archives and traced his own and Julian Manduca’s 13 article story about “The National Bank of Malta Scandal”, which until a few years back one could access via a link on MaltaToday’s portal.
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.
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.
The NBM story stands out as an example of what Mintoff and his socialist party stood for back in 1973.
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.]
Sawwatni ha nhobbok.
The Labour Party’s squatting in property requisitioned from Ms Micovic’s family.
You have to wonder at her judgement.
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.
Instead of money the government and shareholders should consider giving the latter shares in the bank as at least partial compensation.
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.