Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1253597
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 31 MAY 2020 OPINION Raphael Vassallo One… Billion… Euros! I don't know about you, but every time there's a news item about how much money Mal- ta can expect to receive in EU funding, I am always reminded of the 1997 Mike Myers com- edy, 'Austin Powers: Interna- tional Man of Mystery'. I suppose you can already guess which scene. It's the mo- ment when Mr Evil – sorry, DOCTOR Evil (he didn't spend six years at Evil Medical School to be called 'mister', you know) - announces his plan to steal a nuclear warhead, and hold the world to ransom for… (drums rolling)… 'One… Million… Dollars!' So when Roberta Metsola excitedly announced on Face- book yesterday that: "The [EU recovery fund] proposal on the table gives Malta close to… (wait for it)… One… Billion… Euros!" … I half expected the camera to suddenly zoom in to an ex- treme close-up of Commission President Ursula Von Der Ley- en, holding one finger to her lower lip. But there's more to the re- semblance than just the sum of money itself (multiplied by a thousand, naturally)… or even the 'Dr Evil'-like enthu- siastic glee with which such announcements are generally made. There is also a curiously sim- ilar inflationary force at work behind the scenes. What makes that Austin Powers moment so memo- rable, is that the line itself is uttered in 1997… by a crimi- nal mastermind who had been cryogenically frozen since the 1960s (the whole movie, in fact, derives its humour from the premise that both Dr Evil and Austin Powers are oblivi- ous to all the changes that had taken place in the intervening 30 years). 'One Million Dollars' might indeed have been the standard world-ransoming sum of the 1960s; but as one of Dr Evil's associates gently reminds him in the film, it did not actual- ly amount to very much at all by the late 1990s: when even modest companies posted an- nual profits of anywhere up to a thousand times that much. So Dr Evil promptly modifies his demands to what he thinks might be a more daunting figure for the new, unfamil- iar age: and instead asks for… [quick camera-zoom]… 'One… hundred… BIL- LION… dollars!" But while that worked fine for a movie made in 1997… by today's standards, it's still a rather modest request. In its totality, the EU recovery fund actually amounts to over €750 billion; and some people are already arguing that it might not even be enough to mitigate the effects of the post COV- ID-19 economic crisis. This, too, has parallels with Malta's 30-year fascination with how much money we can possibly squeeze out of the EU. By an interesting coincidence, 'Austin Powers' came out in the same year when Prime Minister Alfred Sant had 'fro- zen' – not cryogenically, per- haps; but frozen all the same – Malta's application to join the European Union. I still clearly remember the reaction of former Foreign Minister (later President) Gui- do De Marco: who passionate- ly decried, with much the same drama as a sudden camera zoom, that Sant's actions had just cost the country… "One… hundred… million… Maltese liri!" (the famous 'mitt miljun', for those with good memories). I think we can all agree that that sounded like an awful- ly large sum of money at the time; and yet (taking into ac- count the exchange rate, etc.) what are we talking about to- day is at least five times that value: and unlike Guido's 'mitt miljun', it doesn't represent the total amount of money that Malta could have expect- ed to make by joining the EU. On the contrary, the figure of €1 billion consists of around €350 million in grants, with the rest (around €650 million) taking the form of loans which will somehow have to be paid back by 2058 at the latest. So most of it represents how much the EU is now willing to lend us (with, apparently, a whole bunch of conditions at- tached) to help us through the impending financial crisis. And just like Austin Powers, this forces us to acknowledge how much has really changed over the past two-to-three decades. For let's face it: while 'One Billion Euros' still makes for an impressive soundbite… if only just… in reality, it is but a tiny fraction of the entire re- covery fund: most of which has been earmarked for other EU members states that (unlike our own, thankfully) need that sort of cash injection a heck of a lot more desperately than we do right now. Maybe we don't give our- selves enough credit for the extraordinary economic mira- cle that has evidently occurred in the meantime; but this also means that, in just 23 years, we went from being a country that constantly (and, it must be said, often embarrassingly) knocked on the EU's door with its begging-bowl in hand… to a country that has the luxury of deciding whether it really needs to borrow €650 million from the EU, just to survive. How much of that success is due to the fact that – despite all Alfred Sant's efforts in the late 1990s – we did actually join the EU in the end? In all fairness, I'd say… probably, quite a lot. But now that we're in this enviable position of not actu- ally needing as much financial assistance as we might have