In part two of this mini-series, I reflect on my 7 years living in Malta.
From dodgy accountants to why the political system is so corrupt, I'll tell you what you won't read about on the Maltese tourism website.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of this mini-series on my experience living in Malta.
[00:00:27] If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I’d recommend you do that before this, as I shared a bit about Malta more generally, the types of people who study English there, and a little bit about how the country has changed in recent years.
[00:00:43] In this follow-up episode, part two, we are going to go deeper, and talk about corruption, fraud, identity, and the sort of things that you wouldn’t find on the Maltese Tourist Authority website.
[00:00:56] So, let’s get right into it, shall we?
[00:01:00] There is a phrase that people like to use about Malta, and that’s “sunny island, shady place”.
[00:01:08] Sunny, in the literal sense of the word. The sun shines a lot, 300 days a year if the Maltese tourist board is to be believed.
[00:01:17] And shady in a metaphorical sense, meaning dodgy, untrustworthy, often illegal.
[00:01:27] When I moved to Malta in January of 2017, I soon started following the work of a brave journalist called Daphne Caruana Galizia.
[00:01:39] She published articles all the time, often multiple times a day, on her blog called Running Commentary. Reading the blog, you got a sense that you were inside this lady’s mind, almost that she would learn about something and then immediately rush to her computer, start typing and press publish without a fear in the world for the consequences.
[00:02:04] And what she was writing was scandalous.
[00:02:09] You might think that on a small island with fewer than half a million people there wouldn’t be an awful lot of news, but Daphne could hardly keep up with the tales of sordid corruption that emerged on a daily basis.
[00:02:24] Bribery, fake jobs, offshore bank accounts, money laundering, involving people at the very highest levels of politics and government.
[00:02:35] On October 16th, of 2017, she published an article on her blog about government corruption.
[00:02:43] It ended “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”
[00:02:51] She pressed publish, grabbed her car keys, and got into her rental car. Before she knew it, a bomb under her seat exploded, killing her instantly and emitting a large boom that could be heard from several kilometres away.
[00:03:10] An official enquiry would conclude that the Maltese government bore responsibility for her death.
[00:03:18] The country’s best known journalist was assassinated, and the fingerprints for the crime went right up to the sitting Prime Minister’s office.
[00:03:29] This was how much of the world was introduced to Malta, a country that hadn’t been the subject of any major news story for decades was suddenly on the front page for this gruesome execution.
[00:03:43] Now, the story of this murder, and of the brave work of Daphne Caruana Galizia, is not the subject of this episode.
[00:03:52] We have an entire three-part mini-series on that, episodes 306, 307 and 308, so I’d recommend listening to that if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet.
[00:04:05] The point is that this incident shone a light on quite how corrupt Malta is, and how beneath the surface there is more to this tiny Mediterranean country than a tourist would ever notice.
[00:04:19] Now, as with any small country, Malta has always suffered from clientelism, where politicians trade favours with the business community, backs are scratched, and contracts are handed out based on favours and bribes.
[00:04:37] But, combined with the economic boom in recent years, this has reached new heights.
[00:04:44] The murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia might have been the most visible story of Maltese corruption, but there are almost daily stories of political corruption that are never shared outside Malta.
[00:04:57] Stories that didn’t make the international press include how the Prime Minister was given a valuable plot of land at below market prices by an alleged cocaine trafficker, how this same criminal was awarded a contract to supply transport to the Maltese judiciary while awaiting charges of kidnapping, how one member of parliament would give his constituents fake medical certificates so that they could claim they had epilepsy and claim unemployment benefit or how the Minister of Transport would personally ensure that his friends’ and associates’ children passed their driving exams.
[00:05:34] This kind of corruption is just everywhere, and while many people might think, “well, it probably won’t affect me personally”, if you live in Malta, it will, either directly or indirectly.
[00:05:49] Let me give you a few examples from my own time there.
[00:05:53] The first might seem harmless, and in my case, actually had a positive outcome.
[00:05:59] I was attempting to pay a tax bill online, and the payment system crashed halfway through the process. Annoying, but especially annoying because the payment was taken from my card, for several thousand Euros, but the Maltese tax website said that it had no record of the payment, and that it was still due.
[00:06:22] After dozens of emails, and phone calls, over several months and multiple trips to try to fix it, nobody had any idea what was going on. I had paid the bill, the money had been taken, but it was somehow “lost”, and the tax bill was still due.
[00:06:40] Without any idea what to do, I called someone who had helped me with accountancy advice.
[00:06:47] Fortunately he had a friend in the tax department who was able to manually adjust my tax balance, which this person did without question, without asking to see any documents or proof, he just manually created a payment for me in the system.
[00:07:05] The next example will be one that didn’t make me chuckle quite so much.
[00:07:10] Building regulations in Malta are very lax, almost non-existent.
[00:07:16] There are constant injuries on construction sites, and even if you know nothing about building, simply looking at almost any construction site in Malta will reveal that the construction industry is poorly regulated.
[00:07:31] Anyway, one morning I was walking back from dropping off my son at nursery. It was a glorious day, the sun was shining, blue skies, life was good.
[00:07:41] Then, about a metre in front of me, a huge block of concrete crashed down from a block of apartments that was being built above. It must have been about half a metre wide, and had I been half a second faster crossing the road, you wouldn’t be listening to this now.
[00:08:00] I shouted up to someone, then called the number of the property manager, which was on the block of flats. I told him what had happened, and that I was going to report this. He grew aggressive, and then asked me if I knew who the property developer was, and that he now had my phone number and if I reported it, life would be very difficult for me.
[00:08:25] I asked a friend about it, and it turned out that the developer was the head of the Maltese Property Developers Association, and a close ally of the Maltese labour party.
[00:08:37] I was furious, and reported it anyway.
[00:08:40] After calling the agency that was theoretically responsible for safety on building sites, I was told to submit a report via email, which I did immediately afterwards.
[00:08:52] This was on May 26th, of 2022, and I just double checked the exact date that they responded, the 6th of June, 2023, over a year later. And if you are wondering, their response said that they had just been to visit the site and instructed the people working there to make sure that debris didn’t fall on pedestrians below.
[00:09:16] And these are just a couple of examples. There is a level of lawlessness about Malta that is kind of endearing when you are talking about someone in the tax department manually adjusting your balance because his friend asked him to or people driving badly but not so funny when you realise you were only seconds away from being squashed by a large construction block.
[00:09:39] Now, you might be listening to this and thinking “my country isn’t so different”, or perhaps you are listening to this and thinking “how is this tolerated?”
[00:09:50] For a while I was in that second camp.
[00:09:54] Almost on a daily basis there were stories of politicians from the ruling party abusing their power, and enriching themselves, building huge mansions with swimming pools, being found with millions in offshore bank accounts, and I used to think “surely the people won’t stand for this much longer”.
[00:10:13] But, this party won two elections during the time that I was there, one in 2017 and another in 2022, and it is still the most popular party in opinion polls.
[00:10:27] Corruption is always cited as a major concern by Maltese people in surveys, but when it comes to putting an X in the ballot box, the same politicians who have abused their power for over a decade now are voted back in.
[00:10:43] When talking to Maltese friends about this, one thing that has always been repeated to me is quite how politicised everything is Malta.
[00:10:53] There are, essentially, only two political parties: the Labour party, which has been in power since 2013, and the Nationalist party.
[00:11:04] Labour is theoretically more left wing, and the Nationalists more right wing, but the modern incarnation of the Maltese Labour Party has embraced free market economics in a way that might be uncomfortable even for a right wing party.
[00:11:21] And towns, villages, and even families, are typically either Labour or Nationalist.
[00:11:28] Now, I appreciate that this is the case in most countries, you have areas that are normally more left or right wing, and where political parties tend to be weaker or stronger, but in Malta it is at a completely different level.
[00:11:45] It is almost like a city with two rival football clubs, Inter vs. AC Milan, or Atletico vs. Real Madrid. People are born into families that are either a Labour or a Nationalist family, they are intensely passionate, and very unlikely to switch sides.
[00:12:03] They will defend their “team” to the death, no matter what anyone says about them.
[00:12:09] After the elections, both in 2017 and 2022, there were huge celebrations where buses and tractors drove through all the villages with people dancing and drinking on top of them, they had pictures of the politicians on the front, and such loud music blaring out that the entire country was practically shaking.
[00:12:31] I said to some Maltese friends, “the politicians these people are celebrating are practically convicted fraudsters, there is so much evidence of them having stolen from the public purse, from the Maltese people…from you. But they have put their face on the front of a bus, elevating them to an almost god-like status”.
[00:12:52] What I clearly hadn’t understood was quite the extent of the clientelism that still exists in the country, that these politicians would hand out jobs and favours to people who had supported them, everyone’s lives were getting better.
[00:13:07] What did it matter if they skimmed off a bit from the state coffers for themselves?
[00:13:11] After all, taking from the public purse is a victimless crime, is it not?
[00:13:18] Now, I am not suggesting that the other party, the Nationalist party, would be any less corrupt than the Labour party, but the levels of blatant abuse of public funds is mind boggling.
[00:13:31] For example, in the leadup to the election, the Prime Minister announced that he would be giving a €100 or €200 “bonus cheque” to all adults on the island.
[00:13:44] This wasn’t out of his own election campaign money, mind you, it was from public funds, he was handing out public money on the eve of an election.
[00:13:54] And whenever there was some sort of large political scandal, all employees would receive some kind of government bonus, 50 Euros here or 100 Euros there, and the scandal would die down.
[00:14:09] Now, Malta has got into a bit of trouble with the EU for this, which leads me on to my next point.
[00:14:16] Malta joined the European Union in 2004, along with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
[00:14:29] Although the Maltese people were divided on whether to join the union, it has been the most amazing thing for the country, and has resulted in huge amounts of money flowing into Malta.
[00:14:42] To be precise, in the last 10 years Malta has received €1.6 billion net from the EU, meaning it received €1.6 billion more than it paid in.
[00:14:56] Of course, the entire idea of the EU is that richer, typically northern European, countries pay more to subsidise the growth of less developed countries, such as Malta, and the entire union is lifted up.
[00:15:12] But the level of waste of EU funds and straight up fraud in Malta is enormous.
[00:15:20] This isn’t simply an opinion; Malta has the highest number of fraud cases per capita, the investigations of fraudulent use of EU funds, in the entire EU. And you can see this firsthand living in Malta.
[00:15:37] Any project that receives EU funding would have a little sign outside with the percentage that came from EU funds and the percentage that came from national or private funds.
[00:15:50] With many of them, like an ancient monument or a new bridge, you might see them and think, good, this is exactly the sort of cultural or infrastructural project that EU funds should be going to.
[00:16:03] But in many cases, the value was less clear. These funds would more often than not go to private business projects owned by politicians or their family members, such as building hotels or guesthouses.
[00:16:19] And even with the infrastructure projects, like new road building, there was plenty of misuse there as well. The country has only a few politically-connected companies that win all of the contracts to build roads.
[00:16:33] Fine, you might think, it’s a small place, and it needs roads.
[00:16:38] But what typically happens is that the roads are built or resurfaced so poorly that the work needs to be redone every six months or so. I used to live near a major road, and I think it was resurfaced more than 10 times in 7 years.
[00:16:55] I should say that the EU is starting to cotton on to this, starting to realise what is happening.
[00:17:02] And the fact that Malta has developed economically means that it will not be able to claim as much EU money as it has historically, but the quantity of EU money that has gone into the pockets of Maltese politicians and their families is staggering.
[00:17:18] Now, moving completely away from corruption, one thing that 7 years in Malta does to you is gets you thinking about the concept of nationality.
[00:17:28] As you might know, Malta sells passports.
[00:17:32] In 2013, Malta launched its “citizenship by investment” programme. It might sound glamorous, but it essentially allowed people from outside the EU to get a Maltese passport in exchange for a fee of almost a million Euros.
[00:17:48] The programme has changed slightly now, the requirements have become stricter as the EU has started to pay closer attention, but in its original format it barely required an applicant to set foot on the island.
[00:18:02] A wire transfer was good enough, and a few weeks later, ta-da, a brand-spanking new Maltese passport would be ready for them.
[00:18:11] Now, this passport scheme didn’t really account for very many people in the grand scheme of things, only 1,500 people at the last count, but this brought in a billion and a half Euros to the country.
[00:18:25] This might be a drop in the ocean for a large country, but for a tiny country like Malta, it is significant. It’s €3,000 for every man, woman and child in Malta.
[00:18:39] Now, that’s on one end of the spectrum of people who have become “Maltese”, the people who have paid vast amounts of money to obtain Maltese citizenship, but in most cases have no genuine desire to live here; they just want the passport and the protections it affords.
[00:18:57] On the other end of the spectrum, there are the tens of thousands of foreign workers who now call Malta home.
[00:19:06] As you’ve heard already, Malta has become increasingly reliant on foreign labour, people from outside the EU, typically from places like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
[00:19:18] These people come to the country to work in Maltese restaurants, on Maltese building sites, and in Maltese hotels, working long hours doing hard and low-paid jobs.
[00:19:30] Many will end up calling Malta their permanent home, and raising families here.
[00:19:37] They won’t get a passport, not unless they stay for an absolute minimum of 7 years and jump through many hoops, but they will pay taxes and contribute to society.
[00:19:49] This raises some interesting questions about the concept of nationality, and what it means to be “Maltese”.
[00:19:58] The Russian oligarch who has spent 12 hours in the country has a Maltese passport, but the Filipino hospital porter who has been here for 5 years does not.
[00:20:10] And this question of Maltese identity and nationality is becoming increasingly important.
[00:20:18] According to a forecast by the Economy Minister, if the trend of the past 10 years continues, the population of Malta will increase to 800,000 by 2040, which would be a 55% increase from today, and mean that people born outside Malta would outnumber people born in Malta. In other words, there would be more foreigners than Maltese people.
[00:20:45] Now, to wrap things up, no city or country is perfect, and Malta has changed dramatically over the past 10 years, it has gone from a sleepy Mediterranean tourist destination to one awash with cash, often from dubious sources, and its population has almost doubled since the turn of the 21st century.
[00:21:08] There is a lot to cope with, and the Maltese government can rightfully be proud to have attracted significant investment to the country, investing in public services and meaning that, for most people, their quality of life is better than that enjoyed by their parents or their grandparents.
[00:21:26] Who knows what the next 50 years will bring, but one thing is for sure. It will be interesting to see what lies ahead for this lawless but magical little rock.
[00:21:40] OK then, that is it for this winding exploration of Malta.
[00:21:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt a few new things that you wouldn’t hear from the Maltese tourist board.
[00:21:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:55] Have you been to Malta before? Did you recognise any of the things I talked about? What do people in your country associate with Malta?
[00:22:03] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of this mini-series on my experience living in Malta.
[00:00:27] If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I’d recommend you do that before this, as I shared a bit about Malta more generally, the types of people who study English there, and a little bit about how the country has changed in recent years.
[00:00:43] In this follow-up episode, part two, we are going to go deeper, and talk about corruption, fraud, identity, and the sort of things that you wouldn’t find on the Maltese Tourist Authority website.
[00:00:56] So, let’s get right into it, shall we?
[00:01:00] There is a phrase that people like to use about Malta, and that’s “sunny island, shady place”.
[00:01:08] Sunny, in the literal sense of the word. The sun shines a lot, 300 days a year if the Maltese tourist board is to be believed.
[00:01:17] And shady in a metaphorical sense, meaning dodgy, untrustworthy, often illegal.
[00:01:27] When I moved to Malta in January of 2017, I soon started following the work of a brave journalist called Daphne Caruana Galizia.
[00:01:39] She published articles all the time, often multiple times a day, on her blog called Running Commentary. Reading the blog, you got a sense that you were inside this lady’s mind, almost that she would learn about something and then immediately rush to her computer, start typing and press publish without a fear in the world for the consequences.
[00:02:04] And what she was writing was scandalous.
[00:02:09] You might think that on a small island with fewer than half a million people there wouldn’t be an awful lot of news, but Daphne could hardly keep up with the tales of sordid corruption that emerged on a daily basis.
[00:02:24] Bribery, fake jobs, offshore bank accounts, money laundering, involving people at the very highest levels of politics and government.
[00:02:35] On October 16th, of 2017, she published an article on her blog about government corruption.
[00:02:43] It ended “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”
[00:02:51] She pressed publish, grabbed her car keys, and got into her rental car. Before she knew it, a bomb under her seat exploded, killing her instantly and emitting a large boom that could be heard from several kilometres away.
[00:03:10] An official enquiry would conclude that the Maltese government bore responsibility for her death.
[00:03:18] The country’s best known journalist was assassinated, and the fingerprints for the crime went right up to the sitting Prime Minister’s office.
[00:03:29] This was how much of the world was introduced to Malta, a country that hadn’t been the subject of any major news story for decades was suddenly on the front page for this gruesome execution.
[00:03:43] Now, the story of this murder, and of the brave work of Daphne Caruana Galizia, is not the subject of this episode.
[00:03:52] We have an entire three-part mini-series on that, episodes 306, 307 and 308, so I’d recommend listening to that if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet.
[00:04:05] The point is that this incident shone a light on quite how corrupt Malta is, and how beneath the surface there is more to this tiny Mediterranean country than a tourist would ever notice.
[00:04:19] Now, as with any small country, Malta has always suffered from clientelism, where politicians trade favours with the business community, backs are scratched, and contracts are handed out based on favours and bribes.
[00:04:37] But, combined with the economic boom in recent years, this has reached new heights.
[00:04:44] The murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia might have been the most visible story of Maltese corruption, but there are almost daily stories of political corruption that are never shared outside Malta.
[00:04:57] Stories that didn’t make the international press include how the Prime Minister was given a valuable plot of land at below market prices by an alleged cocaine trafficker, how this same criminal was awarded a contract to supply transport to the Maltese judiciary while awaiting charges of kidnapping, how one member of parliament would give his constituents fake medical certificates so that they could claim they had epilepsy and claim unemployment benefit or how the Minister of Transport would personally ensure that his friends’ and associates’ children passed their driving exams.
[00:05:34] This kind of corruption is just everywhere, and while many people might think, “well, it probably won’t affect me personally”, if you live in Malta, it will, either directly or indirectly.
[00:05:49] Let me give you a few examples from my own time there.
[00:05:53] The first might seem harmless, and in my case, actually had a positive outcome.
[00:05:59] I was attempting to pay a tax bill online, and the payment system crashed halfway through the process. Annoying, but especially annoying because the payment was taken from my card, for several thousand Euros, but the Maltese tax website said that it had no record of the payment, and that it was still due.
[00:06:22] After dozens of emails, and phone calls, over several months and multiple trips to try to fix it, nobody had any idea what was going on. I had paid the bill, the money had been taken, but it was somehow “lost”, and the tax bill was still due.
[00:06:40] Without any idea what to do, I called someone who had helped me with accountancy advice.
[00:06:47] Fortunately he had a friend in the tax department who was able to manually adjust my tax balance, which this person did without question, without asking to see any documents or proof, he just manually created a payment for me in the system.
[00:07:05] The next example will be one that didn’t make me chuckle quite so much.
[00:07:10] Building regulations in Malta are very lax, almost non-existent.
[00:07:16] There are constant injuries on construction sites, and even if you know nothing about building, simply looking at almost any construction site in Malta will reveal that the construction industry is poorly regulated.
[00:07:31] Anyway, one morning I was walking back from dropping off my son at nursery. It was a glorious day, the sun was shining, blue skies, life was good.
[00:07:41] Then, about a metre in front of me, a huge block of concrete crashed down from a block of apartments that was being built above. It must have been about half a metre wide, and had I been half a second faster crossing the road, you wouldn’t be listening to this now.
[00:08:00] I shouted up to someone, then called the number of the property manager, which was on the block of flats. I told him what had happened, and that I was going to report this. He grew aggressive, and then asked me if I knew who the property developer was, and that he now had my phone number and if I reported it, life would be very difficult for me.
[00:08:25] I asked a friend about it, and it turned out that the developer was the head of the Maltese Property Developers Association, and a close ally of the Maltese labour party.
[00:08:37] I was furious, and reported it anyway.
[00:08:40] After calling the agency that was theoretically responsible for safety on building sites, I was told to submit a report via email, which I did immediately afterwards.
[00:08:52] This was on May 26th, of 2022, and I just double checked the exact date that they responded, the 6th of June, 2023, over a year later. And if you are wondering, their response said that they had just been to visit the site and instructed the people working there to make sure that debris didn’t fall on pedestrians below.
[00:09:16] And these are just a couple of examples. There is a level of lawlessness about Malta that is kind of endearing when you are talking about someone in the tax department manually adjusting your balance because his friend asked him to or people driving badly but not so funny when you realise you were only seconds away from being squashed by a large construction block.
[00:09:39] Now, you might be listening to this and thinking “my country isn’t so different”, or perhaps you are listening to this and thinking “how is this tolerated?”
[00:09:50] For a while I was in that second camp.
[00:09:54] Almost on a daily basis there were stories of politicians from the ruling party abusing their power, and enriching themselves, building huge mansions with swimming pools, being found with millions in offshore bank accounts, and I used to think “surely the people won’t stand for this much longer”.
[00:10:13] But, this party won two elections during the time that I was there, one in 2017 and another in 2022, and it is still the most popular party in opinion polls.
[00:10:27] Corruption is always cited as a major concern by Maltese people in surveys, but when it comes to putting an X in the ballot box, the same politicians who have abused their power for over a decade now are voted back in.
[00:10:43] When talking to Maltese friends about this, one thing that has always been repeated to me is quite how politicised everything is Malta.
[00:10:53] There are, essentially, only two political parties: the Labour party, which has been in power since 2013, and the Nationalist party.
[00:11:04] Labour is theoretically more left wing, and the Nationalists more right wing, but the modern incarnation of the Maltese Labour Party has embraced free market economics in a way that might be uncomfortable even for a right wing party.
[00:11:21] And towns, villages, and even families, are typically either Labour or Nationalist.
[00:11:28] Now, I appreciate that this is the case in most countries, you have areas that are normally more left or right wing, and where political parties tend to be weaker or stronger, but in Malta it is at a completely different level.
[00:11:45] It is almost like a city with two rival football clubs, Inter vs. AC Milan, or Atletico vs. Real Madrid. People are born into families that are either a Labour or a Nationalist family, they are intensely passionate, and very unlikely to switch sides.
[00:12:03] They will defend their “team” to the death, no matter what anyone says about them.
[00:12:09] After the elections, both in 2017 and 2022, there were huge celebrations where buses and tractors drove through all the villages with people dancing and drinking on top of them, they had pictures of the politicians on the front, and such loud music blaring out that the entire country was practically shaking.
[00:12:31] I said to some Maltese friends, “the politicians these people are celebrating are practically convicted fraudsters, there is so much evidence of them having stolen from the public purse, from the Maltese people…from you. But they have put their face on the front of a bus, elevating them to an almost god-like status”.
[00:12:52] What I clearly hadn’t understood was quite the extent of the clientelism that still exists in the country, that these politicians would hand out jobs and favours to people who had supported them, everyone’s lives were getting better.
[00:13:07] What did it matter if they skimmed off a bit from the state coffers for themselves?
[00:13:11] After all, taking from the public purse is a victimless crime, is it not?
[00:13:18] Now, I am not suggesting that the other party, the Nationalist party, would be any less corrupt than the Labour party, but the levels of blatant abuse of public funds is mind boggling.
[00:13:31] For example, in the leadup to the election, the Prime Minister announced that he would be giving a €100 or €200 “bonus cheque” to all adults on the island.
[00:13:44] This wasn’t out of his own election campaign money, mind you, it was from public funds, he was handing out public money on the eve of an election.
[00:13:54] And whenever there was some sort of large political scandal, all employees would receive some kind of government bonus, 50 Euros here or 100 Euros there, and the scandal would die down.
[00:14:09] Now, Malta has got into a bit of trouble with the EU for this, which leads me on to my next point.
[00:14:16] Malta joined the European Union in 2004, along with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
[00:14:29] Although the Maltese people were divided on whether to join the union, it has been the most amazing thing for the country, and has resulted in huge amounts of money flowing into Malta.
[00:14:42] To be precise, in the last 10 years Malta has received €1.6 billion net from the EU, meaning it received €1.6 billion more than it paid in.
[00:14:56] Of course, the entire idea of the EU is that richer, typically northern European, countries pay more to subsidise the growth of less developed countries, such as Malta, and the entire union is lifted up.
[00:15:12] But the level of waste of EU funds and straight up fraud in Malta is enormous.
[00:15:20] This isn’t simply an opinion; Malta has the highest number of fraud cases per capita, the investigations of fraudulent use of EU funds, in the entire EU. And you can see this firsthand living in Malta.
[00:15:37] Any project that receives EU funding would have a little sign outside with the percentage that came from EU funds and the percentage that came from national or private funds.
[00:15:50] With many of them, like an ancient monument or a new bridge, you might see them and think, good, this is exactly the sort of cultural or infrastructural project that EU funds should be going to.
[00:16:03] But in many cases, the value was less clear. These funds would more often than not go to private business projects owned by politicians or their family members, such as building hotels or guesthouses.
[00:16:19] And even with the infrastructure projects, like new road building, there was plenty of misuse there as well. The country has only a few politically-connected companies that win all of the contracts to build roads.
[00:16:33] Fine, you might think, it’s a small place, and it needs roads.
[00:16:38] But what typically happens is that the roads are built or resurfaced so poorly that the work needs to be redone every six months or so. I used to live near a major road, and I think it was resurfaced more than 10 times in 7 years.
[00:16:55] I should say that the EU is starting to cotton on to this, starting to realise what is happening.
[00:17:02] And the fact that Malta has developed economically means that it will not be able to claim as much EU money as it has historically, but the quantity of EU money that has gone into the pockets of Maltese politicians and their families is staggering.
[00:17:18] Now, moving completely away from corruption, one thing that 7 years in Malta does to you is gets you thinking about the concept of nationality.
[00:17:28] As you might know, Malta sells passports.
[00:17:32] In 2013, Malta launched its “citizenship by investment” programme. It might sound glamorous, but it essentially allowed people from outside the EU to get a Maltese passport in exchange for a fee of almost a million Euros.
[00:17:48] The programme has changed slightly now, the requirements have become stricter as the EU has started to pay closer attention, but in its original format it barely required an applicant to set foot on the island.
[00:18:02] A wire transfer was good enough, and a few weeks later, ta-da, a brand-spanking new Maltese passport would be ready for them.
[00:18:11] Now, this passport scheme didn’t really account for very many people in the grand scheme of things, only 1,500 people at the last count, but this brought in a billion and a half Euros to the country.
[00:18:25] This might be a drop in the ocean for a large country, but for a tiny country like Malta, it is significant. It’s €3,000 for every man, woman and child in Malta.
[00:18:39] Now, that’s on one end of the spectrum of people who have become “Maltese”, the people who have paid vast amounts of money to obtain Maltese citizenship, but in most cases have no genuine desire to live here; they just want the passport and the protections it affords.
[00:18:57] On the other end of the spectrum, there are the tens of thousands of foreign workers who now call Malta home.
[00:19:06] As you’ve heard already, Malta has become increasingly reliant on foreign labour, people from outside the EU, typically from places like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
[00:19:18] These people come to the country to work in Maltese restaurants, on Maltese building sites, and in Maltese hotels, working long hours doing hard and low-paid jobs.
[00:19:30] Many will end up calling Malta their permanent home, and raising families here.
[00:19:37] They won’t get a passport, not unless they stay for an absolute minimum of 7 years and jump through many hoops, but they will pay taxes and contribute to society.
[00:19:49] This raises some interesting questions about the concept of nationality, and what it means to be “Maltese”.
[00:19:58] The Russian oligarch who has spent 12 hours in the country has a Maltese passport, but the Filipino hospital porter who has been here for 5 years does not.
[00:20:10] And this question of Maltese identity and nationality is becoming increasingly important.
[00:20:18] According to a forecast by the Economy Minister, if the trend of the past 10 years continues, the population of Malta will increase to 800,000 by 2040, which would be a 55% increase from today, and mean that people born outside Malta would outnumber people born in Malta. In other words, there would be more foreigners than Maltese people.
[00:20:45] Now, to wrap things up, no city or country is perfect, and Malta has changed dramatically over the past 10 years, it has gone from a sleepy Mediterranean tourist destination to one awash with cash, often from dubious sources, and its population has almost doubled since the turn of the 21st century.
[00:21:08] There is a lot to cope with, and the Maltese government can rightfully be proud to have attracted significant investment to the country, investing in public services and meaning that, for most people, their quality of life is better than that enjoyed by their parents or their grandparents.
[00:21:26] Who knows what the next 50 years will bring, but one thing is for sure. It will be interesting to see what lies ahead for this lawless but magical little rock.
[00:21:40] OK then, that is it for this winding exploration of Malta.
[00:21:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt a few new things that you wouldn’t hear from the Maltese tourist board.
[00:21:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:55] Have you been to Malta before? Did you recognise any of the things I talked about? What do people in your country associate with Malta?
[00:22:03] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of this mini-series on my experience living in Malta.
[00:00:27] If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I’d recommend you do that before this, as I shared a bit about Malta more generally, the types of people who study English there, and a little bit about how the country has changed in recent years.
[00:00:43] In this follow-up episode, part two, we are going to go deeper, and talk about corruption, fraud, identity, and the sort of things that you wouldn’t find on the Maltese Tourist Authority website.
[00:00:56] So, let’s get right into it, shall we?
[00:01:00] There is a phrase that people like to use about Malta, and that’s “sunny island, shady place”.
[00:01:08] Sunny, in the literal sense of the word. The sun shines a lot, 300 days a year if the Maltese tourist board is to be believed.
[00:01:17] And shady in a metaphorical sense, meaning dodgy, untrustworthy, often illegal.
[00:01:27] When I moved to Malta in January of 2017, I soon started following the work of a brave journalist called Daphne Caruana Galizia.
[00:01:39] She published articles all the time, often multiple times a day, on her blog called Running Commentary. Reading the blog, you got a sense that you were inside this lady’s mind, almost that she would learn about something and then immediately rush to her computer, start typing and press publish without a fear in the world for the consequences.
[00:02:04] And what she was writing was scandalous.
[00:02:09] You might think that on a small island with fewer than half a million people there wouldn’t be an awful lot of news, but Daphne could hardly keep up with the tales of sordid corruption that emerged on a daily basis.
[00:02:24] Bribery, fake jobs, offshore bank accounts, money laundering, involving people at the very highest levels of politics and government.
[00:02:35] On October 16th, of 2017, she published an article on her blog about government corruption.
[00:02:43] It ended “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”
[00:02:51] She pressed publish, grabbed her car keys, and got into her rental car. Before she knew it, a bomb under her seat exploded, killing her instantly and emitting a large boom that could be heard from several kilometres away.
[00:03:10] An official enquiry would conclude that the Maltese government bore responsibility for her death.
[00:03:18] The country’s best known journalist was assassinated, and the fingerprints for the crime went right up to the sitting Prime Minister’s office.
[00:03:29] This was how much of the world was introduced to Malta, a country that hadn’t been the subject of any major news story for decades was suddenly on the front page for this gruesome execution.
[00:03:43] Now, the story of this murder, and of the brave work of Daphne Caruana Galizia, is not the subject of this episode.
[00:03:52] We have an entire three-part mini-series on that, episodes 306, 307 and 308, so I’d recommend listening to that if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet.
[00:04:05] The point is that this incident shone a light on quite how corrupt Malta is, and how beneath the surface there is more to this tiny Mediterranean country than a tourist would ever notice.
[00:04:19] Now, as with any small country, Malta has always suffered from clientelism, where politicians trade favours with the business community, backs are scratched, and contracts are handed out based on favours and bribes.
[00:04:37] But, combined with the economic boom in recent years, this has reached new heights.
[00:04:44] The murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia might have been the most visible story of Maltese corruption, but there are almost daily stories of political corruption that are never shared outside Malta.
[00:04:57] Stories that didn’t make the international press include how the Prime Minister was given a valuable plot of land at below market prices by an alleged cocaine trafficker, how this same criminal was awarded a contract to supply transport to the Maltese judiciary while awaiting charges of kidnapping, how one member of parliament would give his constituents fake medical certificates so that they could claim they had epilepsy and claim unemployment benefit or how the Minister of Transport would personally ensure that his friends’ and associates’ children passed their driving exams.
[00:05:34] This kind of corruption is just everywhere, and while many people might think, “well, it probably won’t affect me personally”, if you live in Malta, it will, either directly or indirectly.
[00:05:49] Let me give you a few examples from my own time there.
[00:05:53] The first might seem harmless, and in my case, actually had a positive outcome.
[00:05:59] I was attempting to pay a tax bill online, and the payment system crashed halfway through the process. Annoying, but especially annoying because the payment was taken from my card, for several thousand Euros, but the Maltese tax website said that it had no record of the payment, and that it was still due.
[00:06:22] After dozens of emails, and phone calls, over several months and multiple trips to try to fix it, nobody had any idea what was going on. I had paid the bill, the money had been taken, but it was somehow “lost”, and the tax bill was still due.
[00:06:40] Without any idea what to do, I called someone who had helped me with accountancy advice.
[00:06:47] Fortunately he had a friend in the tax department who was able to manually adjust my tax balance, which this person did without question, without asking to see any documents or proof, he just manually created a payment for me in the system.
[00:07:05] The next example will be one that didn’t make me chuckle quite so much.
[00:07:10] Building regulations in Malta are very lax, almost non-existent.
[00:07:16] There are constant injuries on construction sites, and even if you know nothing about building, simply looking at almost any construction site in Malta will reveal that the construction industry is poorly regulated.
[00:07:31] Anyway, one morning I was walking back from dropping off my son at nursery. It was a glorious day, the sun was shining, blue skies, life was good.
[00:07:41] Then, about a metre in front of me, a huge block of concrete crashed down from a block of apartments that was being built above. It must have been about half a metre wide, and had I been half a second faster crossing the road, you wouldn’t be listening to this now.
[00:08:00] I shouted up to someone, then called the number of the property manager, which was on the block of flats. I told him what had happened, and that I was going to report this. He grew aggressive, and then asked me if I knew who the property developer was, and that he now had my phone number and if I reported it, life would be very difficult for me.
[00:08:25] I asked a friend about it, and it turned out that the developer was the head of the Maltese Property Developers Association, and a close ally of the Maltese labour party.
[00:08:37] I was furious, and reported it anyway.
[00:08:40] After calling the agency that was theoretically responsible for safety on building sites, I was told to submit a report via email, which I did immediately afterwards.
[00:08:52] This was on May 26th, of 2022, and I just double checked the exact date that they responded, the 6th of June, 2023, over a year later. And if you are wondering, their response said that they had just been to visit the site and instructed the people working there to make sure that debris didn’t fall on pedestrians below.
[00:09:16] And these are just a couple of examples. There is a level of lawlessness about Malta that is kind of endearing when you are talking about someone in the tax department manually adjusting your balance because his friend asked him to or people driving badly but not so funny when you realise you were only seconds away from being squashed by a large construction block.
[00:09:39] Now, you might be listening to this and thinking “my country isn’t so different”, or perhaps you are listening to this and thinking “how is this tolerated?”
[00:09:50] For a while I was in that second camp.
[00:09:54] Almost on a daily basis there were stories of politicians from the ruling party abusing their power, and enriching themselves, building huge mansions with swimming pools, being found with millions in offshore bank accounts, and I used to think “surely the people won’t stand for this much longer”.
[00:10:13] But, this party won two elections during the time that I was there, one in 2017 and another in 2022, and it is still the most popular party in opinion polls.
[00:10:27] Corruption is always cited as a major concern by Maltese people in surveys, but when it comes to putting an X in the ballot box, the same politicians who have abused their power for over a decade now are voted back in.
[00:10:43] When talking to Maltese friends about this, one thing that has always been repeated to me is quite how politicised everything is Malta.
[00:10:53] There are, essentially, only two political parties: the Labour party, which has been in power since 2013, and the Nationalist party.
[00:11:04] Labour is theoretically more left wing, and the Nationalists more right wing, but the modern incarnation of the Maltese Labour Party has embraced free market economics in a way that might be uncomfortable even for a right wing party.
[00:11:21] And towns, villages, and even families, are typically either Labour or Nationalist.
[00:11:28] Now, I appreciate that this is the case in most countries, you have areas that are normally more left or right wing, and where political parties tend to be weaker or stronger, but in Malta it is at a completely different level.
[00:11:45] It is almost like a city with two rival football clubs, Inter vs. AC Milan, or Atletico vs. Real Madrid. People are born into families that are either a Labour or a Nationalist family, they are intensely passionate, and very unlikely to switch sides.
[00:12:03] They will defend their “team” to the death, no matter what anyone says about them.
[00:12:09] After the elections, both in 2017 and 2022, there were huge celebrations where buses and tractors drove through all the villages with people dancing and drinking on top of them, they had pictures of the politicians on the front, and such loud music blaring out that the entire country was practically shaking.
[00:12:31] I said to some Maltese friends, “the politicians these people are celebrating are practically convicted fraudsters, there is so much evidence of them having stolen from the public purse, from the Maltese people…from you. But they have put their face on the front of a bus, elevating them to an almost god-like status”.
[00:12:52] What I clearly hadn’t understood was quite the extent of the clientelism that still exists in the country, that these politicians would hand out jobs and favours to people who had supported them, everyone’s lives were getting better.
[00:13:07] What did it matter if they skimmed off a bit from the state coffers for themselves?
[00:13:11] After all, taking from the public purse is a victimless crime, is it not?
[00:13:18] Now, I am not suggesting that the other party, the Nationalist party, would be any less corrupt than the Labour party, but the levels of blatant abuse of public funds is mind boggling.
[00:13:31] For example, in the leadup to the election, the Prime Minister announced that he would be giving a €100 or €200 “bonus cheque” to all adults on the island.
[00:13:44] This wasn’t out of his own election campaign money, mind you, it was from public funds, he was handing out public money on the eve of an election.
[00:13:54] And whenever there was some sort of large political scandal, all employees would receive some kind of government bonus, 50 Euros here or 100 Euros there, and the scandal would die down.
[00:14:09] Now, Malta has got into a bit of trouble with the EU for this, which leads me on to my next point.
[00:14:16] Malta joined the European Union in 2004, along with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
[00:14:29] Although the Maltese people were divided on whether to join the union, it has been the most amazing thing for the country, and has resulted in huge amounts of money flowing into Malta.
[00:14:42] To be precise, in the last 10 years Malta has received €1.6 billion net from the EU, meaning it received €1.6 billion more than it paid in.
[00:14:56] Of course, the entire idea of the EU is that richer, typically northern European, countries pay more to subsidise the growth of less developed countries, such as Malta, and the entire union is lifted up.
[00:15:12] But the level of waste of EU funds and straight up fraud in Malta is enormous.
[00:15:20] This isn’t simply an opinion; Malta has the highest number of fraud cases per capita, the investigations of fraudulent use of EU funds, in the entire EU. And you can see this firsthand living in Malta.
[00:15:37] Any project that receives EU funding would have a little sign outside with the percentage that came from EU funds and the percentage that came from national or private funds.
[00:15:50] With many of them, like an ancient monument or a new bridge, you might see them and think, good, this is exactly the sort of cultural or infrastructural project that EU funds should be going to.
[00:16:03] But in many cases, the value was less clear. These funds would more often than not go to private business projects owned by politicians or their family members, such as building hotels or guesthouses.
[00:16:19] And even with the infrastructure projects, like new road building, there was plenty of misuse there as well. The country has only a few politically-connected companies that win all of the contracts to build roads.
[00:16:33] Fine, you might think, it’s a small place, and it needs roads.
[00:16:38] But what typically happens is that the roads are built or resurfaced so poorly that the work needs to be redone every six months or so. I used to live near a major road, and I think it was resurfaced more than 10 times in 7 years.
[00:16:55] I should say that the EU is starting to cotton on to this, starting to realise what is happening.
[00:17:02] And the fact that Malta has developed economically means that it will not be able to claim as much EU money as it has historically, but the quantity of EU money that has gone into the pockets of Maltese politicians and their families is staggering.
[00:17:18] Now, moving completely away from corruption, one thing that 7 years in Malta does to you is gets you thinking about the concept of nationality.
[00:17:28] As you might know, Malta sells passports.
[00:17:32] In 2013, Malta launched its “citizenship by investment” programme. It might sound glamorous, but it essentially allowed people from outside the EU to get a Maltese passport in exchange for a fee of almost a million Euros.
[00:17:48] The programme has changed slightly now, the requirements have become stricter as the EU has started to pay closer attention, but in its original format it barely required an applicant to set foot on the island.
[00:18:02] A wire transfer was good enough, and a few weeks later, ta-da, a brand-spanking new Maltese passport would be ready for them.
[00:18:11] Now, this passport scheme didn’t really account for very many people in the grand scheme of things, only 1,500 people at the last count, but this brought in a billion and a half Euros to the country.
[00:18:25] This might be a drop in the ocean for a large country, but for a tiny country like Malta, it is significant. It’s €3,000 for every man, woman and child in Malta.
[00:18:39] Now, that’s on one end of the spectrum of people who have become “Maltese”, the people who have paid vast amounts of money to obtain Maltese citizenship, but in most cases have no genuine desire to live here; they just want the passport and the protections it affords.
[00:18:57] On the other end of the spectrum, there are the tens of thousands of foreign workers who now call Malta home.
[00:19:06] As you’ve heard already, Malta has become increasingly reliant on foreign labour, people from outside the EU, typically from places like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
[00:19:18] These people come to the country to work in Maltese restaurants, on Maltese building sites, and in Maltese hotels, working long hours doing hard and low-paid jobs.
[00:19:30] Many will end up calling Malta their permanent home, and raising families here.
[00:19:37] They won’t get a passport, not unless they stay for an absolute minimum of 7 years and jump through many hoops, but they will pay taxes and contribute to society.
[00:19:49] This raises some interesting questions about the concept of nationality, and what it means to be “Maltese”.
[00:19:58] The Russian oligarch who has spent 12 hours in the country has a Maltese passport, but the Filipino hospital porter who has been here for 5 years does not.
[00:20:10] And this question of Maltese identity and nationality is becoming increasingly important.
[00:20:18] According to a forecast by the Economy Minister, if the trend of the past 10 years continues, the population of Malta will increase to 800,000 by 2040, which would be a 55% increase from today, and mean that people born outside Malta would outnumber people born in Malta. In other words, there would be more foreigners than Maltese people.
[00:20:45] Now, to wrap things up, no city or country is perfect, and Malta has changed dramatically over the past 10 years, it has gone from a sleepy Mediterranean tourist destination to one awash with cash, often from dubious sources, and its population has almost doubled since the turn of the 21st century.
[00:21:08] There is a lot to cope with, and the Maltese government can rightfully be proud to have attracted significant investment to the country, investing in public services and meaning that, for most people, their quality of life is better than that enjoyed by their parents or their grandparents.
[00:21:26] Who knows what the next 50 years will bring, but one thing is for sure. It will be interesting to see what lies ahead for this lawless but magical little rock.
[00:21:40] OK then, that is it for this winding exploration of Malta.
[00:21:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt a few new things that you wouldn’t hear from the Maltese tourist board.
[00:21:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:55] Have you been to Malta before? Did you recognise any of the things I talked about? What do people in your country associate with Malta?
[00:22:03] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
