Attracting the gentleman

Gordon Miller writes today on the Financial Times that since Malta cannot compete with bigger and richer nations, it is focusing on the culture and history to attract foreigners.

Benjamin Disraeli once said of the Maltese capital, Valletta, that it was “a city built by gentlemen for gentlemen”.

The first group of gentlemen to which the 19th-century British prime minister referred was the Knights of St John, a monastic order made up of English aristocrats who were granted ownership of the island in 1530 by Charles V of Spain and who later defended it against Ottoman incursions. The second was presumably people such as Disraeli himself and the poet Lord Byron, who introduced Disraeli to Malta, since the UK ruled the formerly French-ruled territory from 1800 until its independence in 1964.

Continuing the tradition today are businessmen such as Julius Nehorai, who owns homes in London, Los Angeles and Portugal’s Algarve but who relocated to the island’s St Julians three years ago. “Malta appealed to me as a base because it has culture, a great climate, is only a three-hour flight from London and the locals are friendly,” he says. “Most significantly, it has a friendly tax scheme that makes doing business on the island viable.”

His attitude is one that local government and property companies hope to foster among more “gentlemen” buyers, both native and foreign, in coming years as they pull back from a 1970s and 1980s emphasis on mass-market tourism (which resulted in tacky strips of hotels and apartments) to focus on higher-end – yet still quite large – developments, mostly on the north-east coast within easy driving distance of Valletta.