News • 05 October 2003

Dom Mintoff reacts to MaltaToday’s BICAL coverage in this letter to the newspaper

Until now my memory has not yet left me. I remember it well, as if it was yesterday when so many people in Malta, the majority of them workers and others, had lost their jobs because the Nationalist government had not taken the necessary steps to safeguard their monies and jobs.
There had been three cases of companies who had been given permission by the government to operate in Malta. One of these was the case of the Bank of Alderney, whose fate was exactly like that of the BICAL bank – it could not pay back the deposits of the Maltese. There was the case of the pig-breeding company, and the famous case of the airline company, Air Melita, which was backed by the Nationalist government as well as the American Ambassador.
In all these three cases, everything was lost and people were left standing.
In 1972, the BICAL chairman informed the Labour government as well as the Central Bank that BICAL was not in a position to pay back the deposits to their depositors, who had in large quantities withdrawn all their monies from the bank earlier on. If the government and the Central Bank had not intervened, the BICAL bank, which used to give higher interest rates than other banks and which dealt in fraudulent activity as was shown in Court later, would have lost everything as had happened in previous cases.
I remember well how my colleagues and I, the members of the Cabinet, tried hard to see what necessary steps had to be taken to safeguard those jobs at the BICAL bank and the money of BICAL depositors. These were steps which were being taken for the first time in Malta and we had no guarantee this would work.
Through the enormous work of the three Controllers appointed by law to take care of BICAL, and amongst these three Dr K Mifsud Bonnici was the one with the heaviest of workloads, we managed to safeguard the jobs of many people for many years, and for depositors to take back a large part of their deposits, and it is likely that they shall be taking the smaller part which remains.
Throughout this saga there was no occasion on which I instructed someone to procure me the BICAL shares for nothing. It would have been madness to me to procure shares which were such in a bad state, even for nothing.
The allegations you have published are therefore false.