Maltese Finance Minister Reaffirms Idea Of Single Financial Regulator

MaltaMedia

13 November 2000

This article is reproduced by kind permission of MaltaMedia at http://www.maltamedia.com/maltanews/index.html

Minister re-assures on transfer of banking supervision

Finance Minister John Dalli tried to allay fears expressed by the Governor of the Central Bank about the banking supervision function and the manner in which banking supervision responsibilities could eventually be transferred to a single financial regulator. Speaking at the annual dinner of the Chartered Institute of Bankers on Thursday evening, John Dalli stressed that “this decision has been taken way back in 1994 when a root and branch reform of our financial infrastructure was implemented. At that time we had instructed the Central Bank to start its preparation for the transfer of the responsibility for bank regulation to Malta Financial Services Centre. Unfortunately it seems that we are still in the stage of setting a date for preliminary discussions.”

Minister Dalli continued that “I am certain in my mind that the nature of the services given by banks in the future would be so different from today that it will be hard to classify institutions as banks or as other financial institutions. If we do not change we will run the risk of either restricting our banks from metamorphosing into the flexible institutions that the market and international developments would require, or of having institutions falling within the regulatory space of two different organisations. I am informed that this is already the case in some instances where banks are venturing into other financial services. In such case we would be risking to have certain financial services falling between two stools and not be regulated at all, or of having onerous bureaucracy hacking our credit institutions in their development.”

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