Joe, Andrè and the legendary Totò

Earlier on this year, I submitted a Parliamentary Question to the Minister of Finance relating to the current Prospectus of the notorious La Valette Property Fund. This fund is still open for subscriptions by the general public as the MFSA had thought it fit that its licence is not withdrawn.

Furthermore this Prospectus - dated 10 August 2010  - carries a statement that it is approved by the MFSA. Now, the fly in the ointment is that certain statements carried in this Prospectus are diametrically opposite to the findings of the MFSA published in June of last year. In its conclusions, the MFSA had found that the La Valette Sicav, its Manager Valletta Fund Management and its delegates, and its Custodian, Bank of Valletta, had wrongly interpreted the Investment Restrictions of the Prospectus and had failed to exercise due diligence and to exercise a monitoring and oversight rule as required by law.

Hence in my PQ, I asked whether the Minister of Finance is aware of the situation that the current prospectus is "false, incorrect and misleading", and how this failure to update the Prospectus to state that the Investment Restrictions of the Fund had been breached on at least nine occasions (practically from inception) constituted a breach of the MFSA's own Regulations.

This PQ, making such a most serious allegation that MFSA was aware of all this and had scandalously failed to take any action to protect the general public, continued to gather dust and was left unanswered when Parliament hurriedly adjourned for yet another extended holiday... quite probably, indefinitely.

So I thought that an article on the online portal Maltastar might do the trick and induce the MFSA as a public authority to render an explanation of their apparent lack of action in line with their obligations of transparency and accountability and the citizens' legitimate expectations. 

Therefore, I published the PQ on Maltastar on 23 July under the title 'BOV's Property Fund Prospectus - Questions too hot to handle'. I invited the MFSA to reply in terms of the Press Act with any corrections or denial.  No sight of any sort of answer.

I thought that perhaps publishing the article on a Sunday newspaper might work. Therefore, I repeated the article on Malta Today on 29 July. 

Both articles were not published with any parliamentary privilege... yet again, deafening silence!

I started to appreciate the feeling of hopelessness and frustration that common citizens feel when they refer a consumer complaint to this organisation called MFSA. If this public authority metes such treatment to a people's representative in parliament, what sort of attention does a common citizen get from MFSA?

Lest I be misunderstood, this sorry plight of the MFSA is not the fault of its rank and file staff. The fish rots at its head, and indeed the trouble is with its Chairman and Director General. These are not only ineffective, toothless, impotent and lacking in personality as they have already been labelled by others in the past, but also have no sense of shame. They take the cowardly approach of ignoring these most serious allegations which they cannot refute on account of their manifest veracity with the hope of not stirring a controversy in the hope that the matter will die a natural death, while they continue to pocket their top salaries for Malta. 

Will he and the other keeper of consciences - Andrè Camilleri - have a modicum of shame and proceed to do the decent thing and resign in the face of almost total abandonment of their statutory mission: restricting themselves to doing only what is inevitable and irrefutable, and in any case too little too late?

In the meantime, the MFSA-announced exercise into validating the investors' complaints in which they allege they did not satisfy the Experienced Investor definition formal criteria, let alone the substantive meaning of it, is moving at a snail's pace. The appointment of an external independent services firm by the MFSA does not appear to have been made, and in line with its forma mentis the MFSA does not feel any obligation to keep the general public informed about it in the same way they never account, inform or explain the exercise of their statutory discretionary powers, often manifestly not in the interests of the general investing public they are meant to protect. 

Informed sources say that if the firm were to be appointed and the exercise starts in earnest tomorrow, it is probable that such an exercise would take much longer than the end of this year as had been promised by the MFSA in its Media Release of 4 June 2012. But of course by now the poor consumer complainants are used to placing little value in MFSA indications of expected dates. All will remember that the misselling exercise published this June had already been described as "completed and imminent" 10 months earlier, exactly on 23 August 2010. Not only were the investigation results published much later - in June 2012 - but the complainants were told by the MFSA that the complaint validation exercise had yet to start.

"E' io pago!" says the great and legendary Totò in his film 'Morto che Parla', as would any taxpaying citizen faced with such a waste of resources by this government and its acolytes, who are appointed to top posts in Malta's premier organisations.

The author is shadow minister for education.