Consumer & Competition Division

Commission for Fair Trading

Progress, being very often swift and unrelenting, necessarily requires well-focused, timely but sometimes costly interventions for the benefit of the common good. Indeed, our relatively swift assimilation of the principles of European Community Competition Law, an area of particular sensitivity, has rendered necessary expert and dexterous handling. Mismanagement only allows for appalling results. The legal, economic and social dimensions effected call for a truly well focused regime.

With the benefit of hindsight, this absorption can certainly be said to have proved to be a far-reaching, sensible and positive route to embrace. Quite simply, these principles have not only proved to be revolutionary in outlook but, at one and the same time, they also seem to have gradually attracted not only the general consensus of consumer and entrepreneur alike, but also of the whole political spectrum. Yet, further impetus still seems to be required.

Chapter 379 of the Laws of Malta is obviously a radical departure from the controlled environment of yesteryear. The former safe haven of economic autocratic disquisition where, the powers that be, the local commercial community and incredibly even the consumer, were all happily hypnotized into a false sense of security, is now defunct. The former controlled economic structure can no longer generally be depicted as fair, viable or relevant to modern socio-economic reality. Experience clearly shows that an overhaul of extant economic structures was urgently required to revamp the whole economic edifice and re-align it anew according to the exigencies of anti-trust principles. It was deemed that this was the only way that one could candidly assert and establish a fair level playing field for the benefit of all those effected before it became irremediably too late.

The introduction of these principles in our particular mental framework was definitely a well-focused strategic step of enormous social consequence betraying at one and the same time an immense dose of economic acumen and political courage. It not only amounted to a quantum leap of enormous proportions in an area which was not familiar to the local set-up, but it also unleashed a whole new economic scenario aimed at the ultimate advancement of all the protagonists involved. Long-standing ingrained autocratic attitudes were no longer deemed to be feasible. The courage of embarking in this new direction now only needed to be suitably supported and sustained.