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15 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 11 APRIL 2021 NEWS that held sway in the disastrous Cultural Revolution (they in- cluded Mao Zedong's all-pow- erful wife, rid of soon after after Mao's death). "They rel- ished their role and would not have liked others to share in it – so I then thought," Sant said of the men with paramount influence on Mintoff, namely Marsovin owner George Cas- sar and magnate Albert Mizzi, attorney general Edgar Mizzi, and Maurice Abela, head of the Foreign Office. "Fast-talking at the right mo- ment, direct and assertive, Al- bert Mizzi could still be a good listener as like Valhmor Borg he chomped on some cigarillo or other. He enjoyed the huge prestige of having piloted Air Malta towards a successful launch and had then estab- lished it as a profit-making unit, when others had predict- ed doom and gloom for it." Mizzi's widespread interests in importation to produc- tion, put him in good stead for Mintoff's industrial base. As scion of the Alf. Mizzi Group, Bertie not only gave his advice 'gratis' to Mintoff; he was an in- strumental part of a corporatist model in which his businesses profited by expanding national production and tourism devel- opment, the ultimate aim being the creation of jobs and bal- ancing Malta's trade bill. Miz- zi's capitalist pedigree still had him pegged as a Nationalist by hardcore Labourites, Sant sug- gests. "Mintoff relied on him to assess how his ideas would bounce in or off the business community though that would not necessarily mean he would take his advice. Mizzi took any rejection of his 'advice' coolly. 'Off the record' he could make it clear that the PM had taken an unwise route, though he al- ways expressed his judgements in business, never in political terms. "At times, he criticised both political parties for positions they took which he held were mistaken. In all this, nobody was fooled into believing that Mizzi was failing to take good care of his own. Yet there is al- so no doubt that throughout, in the Mintoff administration, he fulfilled a very useful func- tion that was in the national interest." Mizzi's positioning with Mintoff was such that he could partner his family's con- tacts with government's inter- national reach: Sant says he used Chinese funds to convert the state enterprise produc- ing the unpalatable Maltese Deserta chocolate, switched production to biscuits through a licence from the McVities brand, obtained via a Trinidad- ian technical partner. Then it went private under the name of Consolidated Biscuits, pro- ducing the McVitie's and Crawford's brands for the local market on two biscuit lines. It also developed its own Devon brand. Millions of Bourbon biscuits and custard creams treated generations of Maltese, none the wiser about the sug- ary seduction of State capital- ism. Edgar Mizzi, who before the 1971 Labour victo- ry was a top advisor to Prime Minister Borg Olivier, fulfilled the same function for Mintoff with the latter's full confi- dence. Sant remembers him as suave yet forthright, clinical, economical with words, and dispassionate, "only influenced it seemed by his beliefs about what the government should be doing. He was what the French would call an 'homme d'état' for whom state interests should prevail over all others." Mintoff recognised this, such that even when Mizzi contra- dicted something the PM had put forward with conviction, he was spared the high-volt- age response. "You would see the premier look down at some writing pad he had be- fore him, scribble something on it, then look sideways at Mizzi, then back at his pad and the discussion would go on. This did not mean that at times, Mintoff did not insist to proceed with the way forward that he had proposed. Yet, his decision did not feel for those present like it was a de- feat for the attorney general." As for Maurice Abela, Sant says his former boss at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had come in from the cold after having been deemed responsible for the PN's failed attempts at gerry- mandering electoral bounda- ries in their favour for the 1971 election. "He had bounced back with gusto from his initial position of disgrace with the incoming Labour administra- tion. Indeed, he was the hard- est working person in the civil service that I ever knew, being available at all times to do what needed to be done." Despite his prowess inside the belly of government, Abe- la "sometimes got bawled out by the premier when there was nobody else to take the brunt of the PM's furious reactions to whatever was being said." For Abela, it was all water off a duck's back, Sant says, for he appeared able to absorb the Mintoffian invective. "I frequently wondered what was in his mind while all this was happening – he was too intelligent not to anchor his own opinion to the assessment he had made about the facts he knew. This however should not be taken to mean that Ab- ela was somehow in frequent clash with the premier. To the contrary, on many issues their views were very close, and Ab- ela would then sound like an effusive echo chamber for what Mintoff would have already said." Sant says Marsovin's Cassar was wary of Mizzi's "designs and moves", perhaps the only one who managed to weather the give-and-take of his rela- tionship with Mintoff. Then Sant draws a link be- tween political power and cap- ital, upon which the mighty in the business world always can count on with a twitch on their long thread. It was a few weeks before 1981, and Mintoff was placing hard conditions on a private buy-out of government's share- holding in a Mizzi-run textile factory, CIM, which had been losing markets and making losses. "It had been giving Cas- tille the impression it was on top of the world. When it was discovered that this was not the case, Mizzi got his share of flak." But the farsighted Mizzi made his calculations, Sant surmises: setting his eyes on the Tigné peninsula early in the day. The Malta Development Corpora- tion at the time had set up a company to renovate the Tigné Barracks into a housing estate. Mizzi took the young and up- coming contractor Angelo Xuereb with him to a meeting with Sant, asking that he be placed in the government com- pany tasked with the housing project. "Interestingly, even while he did this, Mizzi was volubly critical of the Tigné project as a whole, believing it to be misguided. In his view, rath- er than lay out a new housing estate, development at Tigné should be based on converting the whole area to an upmarket commercial plaza, backed with luxury residential and recrea- tional facilities. In this way, the whole layout of Sliema would be radically changed." And indeed, years later under the Nationalist administration of Eddie Fenech Adami, An- gelo Xuereb and Albert Mizzi would face each other off in the public competition for the private land transfer of Tigné. Mizzi's MIDI plc won the day, perhaps expectedly... "To be sure, Mizzi's approach was noteworthy because it fo- cussed on getting things done, of course in his own way... That was the priority, an attitude which I respected and rather liked," Sant recalls. mvella@mediatoday.com.mt "At times, he criticised both political parties for positions they took which he held were mistaken. In all this, nobody was fooled into believing that Mizzi was failing to take good care of his own. Yet there is also no doubt that throughout, in the Mintoff administration, he fulfilled a very useful function." Out of the ashes of the dreaded Desserta... came the beloved Bourbon biscuit