Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1257572
6 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 10 JUNE 2020 NEWS ANALYSIS SCOOTER 001 SHARING THE PRESENT, SO WE CAN BUILD A BETTER FUTURE. One app. Over 450 shared vehicles. Pay per minute, per hour or per day. goto.com.mt/download * Rate per minute for Scooter trips on the GoTo Business Plan. Terms and Conditions apply. €1.50 PAGE 2 PAGE 5 Silvio Schembri apologises for 'unfortunate' foreign workers comments Banking customers offered home loan moratorium due to Covid-19 THURSDAY 19 MARCH 2020 • ISSUE 50 WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.COM.MT DAVID HUDSON A rescue package worth €1.8 bil- lion has been unveiled to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on the economy. PAGE 3 PAGE 2 Editorial PAGE 9 RIDING OUT THE STORM AND SAVING JOBS Coronavirus Government announces €1.8b rescue package to mitigate crisis Robert Abela BOV registers pre-tax profit of €89.2m • Government to pay companies €350 per employee on quarantine leave • Businesses ordered to shut down temporarily, will receive two days of assistance per week per employee Id-dinja dieħla f'riċessjoni? U Malta? www.illum.com.mt ARA PAĠNI 12 u 13 €1.25 IL-ĦADD 22 TA' MARZU 2020 • NRU 701 'Il-Gvern huwa rrassenjat li se nitilfu x-xogħol. Mentri aħna rridu nsalvawh' 'ROBERT GĦINNA QABEL IKUN TARD WISQ' Il-GWU, l-MHRA, il-GRTU, il-FATTA u l-UĦM mal-ILLUM iwissu li jekk il-Gvern mhux se jħabbar miżuri ġodda se jibdew jingħalqu n-negozji u jintilfu l-impjiegi, speċjalment fit-turiżmu, fir-ristoranti u d-divertiment! ARA PAĠNI 4 u 5 PAĠNI 10 u 11 SUNDAY • 22 MARCH 2020 • ISSUE 1064 • PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY AND SUNDAY €1.95 maltatoday This won't work, Robert EDITORIAL MT2 ROBERT Abela's package does not go far enough and will not work. Malta has entered a war which has destabilised the economy and all its workers. Abela cannot be scared of spending and rack- ing up the necessary government debt needed for a national stim- ulus now: the risks of not acting will be greater than what lies ahead in the next months. He must alleviate economic hard- ship during the epidemic to pre- vent lasting damage to the econ- omy by stopping this recession from turning into the next Great Depression. What Malta needs is a form of universal credit for all, to keep aggregate demand up and so that idle workers at home can return straight to work at the end of the crisis and restore the supply chain. STAY IN, STAY SAFE, WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER WWW.MALTATODAY.COM.MT/COVID19 Our appeal is simple: Maltese businesses must be sustained by keeping workers in a job with a social insurance that sustains their wages CLAUDIO GRECH 'We cannot allow Maltese businesses to fail. We would be failing society' INTERVIEW MT2 Never before has your support of free and independent journalism been so crucial Support us with a subscription or a donation maltatoday.com.mt/maltatodaydigitaledition Populist showboating and bad How the Captain Morgan strategy Four reasons why Malta's pushback- and-migrant- standoff strategy backfired JAMES DEBONO MALTA'S Prime Minister Rob- ert Abela showed signs of polit- ical immaturity by sabre-rattling on migration during a global pandemic where nobody cared about his foot-stamping. With- out even thinking of a fallback position, he ended up capitu- lating – accepting to take in all the 400 migrants after a 40-day standoff which was largely ig- nored by his EU partners. Here are four reasons why this strate- gy boomeranged on Abela 1. He raised expectations of xenophobes and racists. Now they are disappointed One cannot accuse Abela of deliberately fanning racism or xenophobia. His argument was framed in two important and rational considerations: the lack of responsibility-sharing in the EU and the fact that Mal- ta had to close its ports because of the pandemic. But a stand-off that kept hun- dreds of migrants detained on Captain Morgan pleasure crafts, raised the expectations of the anti-immigrant brigade, emboldening not only the loony and extreme right but al- so a segment in his own party, which felt free to vent hatred against activists and NGOs. It also brought back to the fore a latent Euroscepticism and ob- solete nationalism inside La- bour, which the party had tried to ditch in past years. In short, Abela's actions brought back the worms out of the woodwork. Now Abela's only fallback is to present the migrants, who rebelled after 40 days of ille- gal detention outside Malta's territorial waters, as criminals who threatened to blow up the boat and who forced him to capitulate not to endanger the lives of the crew. In doing so Abela is indirectly fanning more xenophobia and racism. Not only does he ignore that the migrants' rebellion was the inevitable consequence of inhumane conditions, which he imposed on them; but his depiction of migrants as crim- inals sends a strong message to society not to accept them at the very moment when Abela had to let them in. Now Abela has to deal with the monster he nourished over the past weeks, a monster that finds even more fertile ground in times of eco- nomic uncertainty. What is sure is that while economic recovery will need migrant la- bour, events like those that happened in the past days, are bound to backfire on any inte- gration policy. 2. By holding migrants hos- tage, he came out as a bad faith negotiator with the EU Despite failing to change EU rules to spread the responsibil- ity of migrants away from fron- tier states to the rest of the EY, Joseph Muscat had managed to secure ad hoc deals with mem- ber states to relocate migrants from Malta. Yet in the middle of global pandemic, which ob- viously made any collective EU response even more difficult, Abela engaged in a test brink- manship, which was ultimately exposed as Lilliputian and di- plomacy of bad faith. As expected other EU coun- tries, even those who normally heed Malta's call for responsi- bility sharing, would not nego- tiate on repatriations as long as human beings were being held in a state of illegal detention in the middle of the sea. Negoti- ating in such circumstances would have simply legitimized