Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1221489
3 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 MARCH 2020 Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications I have lived in Canada and have been a client of Bank of Valletta for years. But I feel I have been mistreated, indeed treated more like a criminal than a client. Just like the similar experiences of many others here in Canada and my relatives in the United States, I decided to close my Bank of Valletta account and transfer my deposits and pension to my Canadian bank account. When I received the final Bank of Valletta statement, I was shocked be- cause I was charged CAN$1,355.30 in fees, taxes and closure of account for a deposit sum of CAN$39,307.27. An expert here in Canada who worked with Bank of Valletta told me that I should not have paid more than CAN$150 in total. When I visited my Canadian bank, I realised this was day- light robbery – as described by my bank manager: "what a rip off, how many crooks do you have in your country?" I was startled and shocked even more when the same manager told me that if he had to do the same here and send the funds to a Maltese bank, I would pay no more than CAD$50, not CADS1355.30! After countless calls and emails to Joyce Tabone, manager business re- structuring unit at Bank of Valletta (all in vain since nobody answers you) I decided to write to the newspapers in Malta about this daylight robbery, to show fellow Maltese in Malta that we the Maltese who live abroad not only still love our country, but we invested in our country and are now being severely mistreated by this bank! Initially, Bank of Valletta asked us to invest our money at the BOV Toronto branch, then one day closed shop and ran away with our money to Malta. Where is the bank regulator? I demand a detailed explanation for this fiasco. Paul Dalli Toronto, Canada The 'redeemer' myth HERMANN Reimarus, a professor of Oriental languages at the Hamburg Academy, left at his death in 1768 a 4,000-page manuscript on the origins of Christianity. He argued that Jesus, the Jewish reformer, had no intention of establishing a new religion. Reimarus not only rejected the mir- acles and resurrection of Jesus but pic- tured him as a deluded young Jew who was faithful to Judaism to the end, and who accepted the belief of some Jews that the world was soon to be destroyed. Albert Schweitzer observed that Re- imarus was "the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological", based on a theory of an imminent end of the world. Geza Vermes, a translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and author of several books on the Jewish background of Jesus, said: "If it is accepted that we can know something about Jesus, one realizes that we are dealing with a totally Jewish person with totally Jewish ideas, whose religion was totally Jewish, and whose culture, aims, and aspirations could be understood only in the framework of Judaism." The man who detached the early followers of Jesus from Judaism was Paul of Tarsus. The break continued in John's gospel. Jesus was no longer pre- sented as a Jew [but] made to address the Jews as "you" and to speak of their Law as "yours". In this perspective, the Jewish life of Jesus could be put into the background. "The Jesus of Naza- reth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another" (Albert Schweitzer). John Guillaumier St Julian's BOV fees for Maltese in Canada