December the 8th saw the voters flocking to the ballot box.

One thing is certain; our democratic process is alive and well: over 82% of registered voters cast their ballot. This in itself is an achievement in today’s modern western world where voter apathy normally push turnouts well below 50%.

For the second time in recent history the voters have delivered a minority government, which did not gain 50% of the electorates’ support. A meagre 2% separated the two main parties: it was very, very close. All said and done your Board congratulates and welcomes the new GSLP / Liberal Alliance government, and looks forward to working closely with them over the coming four years.

The Chamber also wishes to thank Peter Caruana and the outgoing GSD Government for the past 16 years of secure and dedicated service to Gibraltar; no one should underestimate what has been achieved.

The new Chief Minister Fabian Picardo takes the helm with huge challenges ahead of him. As well as having to win the confidence of the other 50% of the electorate, there are many areas which affect our private sector “economic engine” which are crucial to our future economic prosperity. These require very careful care and attention.

Mr. Picardo comes to power at a time when many of the world’s economies are suffering from low GDP growth and high inflation. The Euro zone is in turmoil, and our closest neighbours are set to deliver negative GDP in 2012, along with the Euro zone as a whole.

With that backdrop the new administration needs to be quick to address local business concerns if they are to deliver the growth forecast set out in their manifesto, which is an ambitious 50% + over a four year period.

All the above said, there are clear signs, that after only just over a month, (with a big lull over the Christmas break) the new team are bedding down and already starting to deliver on certain manifesto commitments.

However, there are already diktats that the Chamber takes issue with. Changing the May Day holiday from the first Monday in May, to the 1st of May is one thing; adding another bank holiday on the nearest Monday to April 28th is difficult to justify. These changes are not good for business in Gibraltar, and just when our neighbour is ridding herself of “puentes” Gibraltar is introducing them! Similarly, we now have more bank holidays than almost all countries in Europe. How can we possibly hope to meet our GDP targets by reducing the number of working days in the year? We urge the new Government to relook at this manifesto commitment to better benefit the business needs of the economy.

For the GSLP / Alliance to succeed a key point is the need for continual dialogue with the business community – and so to that end your Board has arranged a lunch with Mr. Costa at the Chamber, and Mr. Picardo will be our host at the a dinner to measure the first 100 days in office of the GSLP / Liberals. This will be held at the Rock Hotel on Wednesday the 7th of March.

There was great sadness at the Chamber on the announcement of the passing of Sir Robert (Bob) Peliza in December. As the first Chief Minister under the 1969 Constitution he held office from 1969-72.

Sir Robert lead a coalition government with the threesome Isola Group but tensions within the government brought about an early general election, which he lost.

Years later Bob Peliza was elected Speaker of the House of Assembly and during that time he was also Hon Colonel of the Gibraltar Regiment. He also spearheaded the campaign for full British Citizenship for Gibraltarians at the time of the enactment at Westminster of the current Nationality Act. In retirement he was knighted and received the Freedom of the City of Gibraltar, which filled him with great satisfaction. Sir Robert Peliza was a hard worker in all his undertakings and a staunch defender of the rights of Gibraltarians.

The Chamber is studiously looking at the changes by the new Administration to the Employment Act. We will report further on these changes when we have taken representations from members”.

Chambers & Partners, the leading publisher of directories for the global legal profession, describes him as “a legend on the local scene”. But spend five minutes in the company of Joseph Emanuel Triay, QC – or JE as he is better known – and it quickly becomes evident that this is not a description he is comfortable with. In fact, it is clear he would rather move swiftly on to the next subject.

“I was brought up in a profession where you should not advertise yourself or self promote,” he says. “All this business of legend and whatever, there’s nothing legendary about it. All there is is somebody who has applied himself to his work and been successful. I know that I’ve fielded some very difficult points of law in my career, and won some.”

And then he chuckles, adding: “But I’ve probably lost more cases than I’ve won.”

J.E. Triay was born in Gibraltar in 1931 in a house on Main Street, adjacent to the Supreme Court where he was to spend much of his working life. The son of lawyer Sergio Pelayo Triay, KC, he knew early on that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. “Fundamentally, I’m a lawyer because my father was a lawyer,” Mr Triay says. “I’m a lawyer because I said at a very early age that that is what I would be. I was committed to law, though I didn’t then know what law was about.”

Mr Triay has stepped back from his court practising but still handles consultancy work from an office at Triay & Triay, the law firm founded in 1905 by his father’s partner, Arthur C. Carrara CMG, KC. There he works surrounded by his father’s books and furniture. They are items that hark back to a different era, a different way of doing things. It is also a decor that embodies an upright sense of formality and continuity, a link to the past that is evident both in the man that now occupies that office, and in the legal practice he inherited and built up. Mr Triay describes it as “traditionalism” and he learnt it here, in this building at 28 Irish Town, working under the tutorship of his father.

“I would regard my father as my pattern of life,” he says. “I never had any legal experience anywhere else but under my father. It is the traditionalism that you learn, wherever you learn it, that matters. It is the traditionalism that matters because that is where the principles are enshrined, the codes of conduct. I never needed to read a code of conduct to know what the proper behaviour was. No one ever had to say to me ‘this is against the rules’. Because one was circumspect about conduct. Certainly one had to defend one’s clients, but not in a way that one would not approve of oneself.”

The early years of the young J.E. Triay were scarred by war, first in Spain, then across Europe. The onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 had a dramatic impact on Mr Triay’s family life. His mother was from Algeciras and most of her friends leaned to the right of the political spectrum, whereas his father was a liberal. “So we had a family situation which was very awkward,” Mr Triay says. “My mother’s family used to regard my father as almost a communist. And yet at the time of the bombardment of Algeciras, the whole of the Algeciras family came to Gibraltar and lived with him.”

As a young boy, Mr Triay spent many weekends in Spain. But all that stopped when his father was blacklisted by the Franco regime. These were turbulent years that remain marked in his memory to this day. In 1939, just before his eighth birthday, the young J.E. Triay was sent to boarding school in England, St George’s College in Weybridge. Shortly after he and his family arrived, war was declared in Europe.

Through a series of events and frustrated travel plans, the Triay family was to spend the duration of World War II trapped in England. In the early part of the war the elder Mr Triay, who had been appointed assistant Attorney General in Gibraltar, had hoped to move his family to Tangiers and commute to the Rock for work. But there were no ships from England and a plan to cross the English Channel and travel by train to Marseilles, then onwards by sea to Morocco, fell through when German forces overran France. Later he tried to emigrate to Jamaica, where there was already a sizeable community of Gibraltarian evacuees. But that plan too fell apart on news that a German battleship was hunting Allied tonnage in the Atlantic. Surrounded by sea and war and almost penniless, a breakthrough finally came in the form of employment for Rawlinson & Hunter, the auditors of Nestlé. Sergio Triay was recruited and continued working for Nestlé after the war as head of the company’s legal department, first in New York and later in Switzerland. The young J.E. Triay tagged along until 1947 when, now a young teenager with ambitious ideas, he returned to England and his studies.

Perhaps it was his unusual childhood, the fact that from a young age he was exposed to the wider world and the harsh realities of a life upturned by war. Or perhaps it was the experience of international business during his later professional life. Whatever the reason, J.E. Triay does not subscribe to the view that Gibraltar is somehow different to the rest of the world. His is an internationalist outlook, forged through an upbringing in troubled times and a career that had a global focus well before globalisation became a trendy word. “I’m totally opposed to this concept that Gibraltar is in any way special,” he says. “What is special in Gibraltar is the particular conditions under which we live. We are a very close community. We are a community whose importance has been pumped up artificially by military interests. And as a society we behave a little bit abnormally because our conditions are abnormal.”

Abnormal or not, Gibraltar is home for J.E. Triay and, after completing his studies in London, he returned to practice law alongside his father and brother. He was perhaps younger than most graduate lawyers, having opted out of sixth form to plunge strait into the study of law as an external student of the University of London. He says he worked at his own pace and took exams when he felt ready.

Mr Triay was called to the Bar in December, 1952, and, like lawyers nowadays, cut his teeth in the Magistrates Court. It was a steep learning curve that intensified with the death in July, 1954, of Sergio Triay. His sons were left to take the reins of the family business.

“We had to take over the practice that my father had left,” Mr Triay says. “We were very lucky because all the cases that my father had left, we succeeded in winning. That gave us a great start and it also gave us confidence, which is one of the things that you lack as a young man landed with a responsibility that you can’t really handle.”

Looking back on those years, he recalls a case that marked a landmark in his career. He received a call from a man named J.R. Mullion, a client of his father’s who was active in shipping and had interests in Hong Kong. They conducted a case against the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank on his behalf and secured a settlement of £1.25m after what Mr Triay describes as “a tricky negotiation”. The year was 1966, and that was a large sum. The case was important too because a key role was played by an old friend of Sergio Triay’s, “a fellow traveler lawyer” named D.N. Pritt. The elder Mr Triay and Mr Pritt had met years earlier handling the case of the SS Stancroft, a ship that was hijacked into Gibraltar amid claims that it was carrying munitions during the Spanish Civil War. The two developed a friendship that was never to be broken, and now Mr Pritt was working with the younger Triays.

“That case was certainly a landmark,” Mr Triay says. “For some time after that, I had become almost the in-house lawyer of this client, hopping onto planes at least once a month, mostly to London but also at least once a year to Hong Kong.”

As he recounts the story of his working life, J.E. Triay regularly veers off into a philosophical analysis of the practice of law. He says that when he started out, he believed law to be an objective career. But he quickly found that it was, in practice, filled with subjectivity and individual quirks. “While one has to work within certain objective legal principles and the parameters of the law as it is, what is never realised is that the clients are anything but objective,” he says. “So to have to handle your case in a way that is satisfactory to your client, who is full of subjectivities, and present his case in an objective manner, takes thought and patience, and a healthy dose of diplomacy.”

Mr Triay never specialized in any particular area of law, believing that a good lawyer should have the analytical skills to handle any type of case. He describes himself as “a very ample generalist”, in the sense that he was never afraid to take on a specialist case. “Even now, if someone comes with a problem, I don’t have any difficulty in getting the books, seeing how the land lies and developing an opinion,” he says.

Time and again Mr Triay returns to the question of “traditionalism”, the guiding principle that he has tried to make the backbone of his practice of law over the years. He recalls cross-examining an English solicitor and being told subsequently that, despite the grilling, “it was never personally unpleasant.”

“The law gives you plenty of opportunity of bullying,” he says. “Lawyers that bully don’t only bully the other side, they end up bullying their own clients as well. At the end of the day, whether you’re a doctor, an architect or a lawyer, you have a basic ego. And you can disguise that if you want to, but that comes out. It’s down to the individual and his own experience. What you have experienced in life shapes the way that you’re going to behave.”

“Mr Triay believes that the experience of being able to work with his father underpinned a vocational approach to the way he conducted his own career. Whilst, the vocational approach is still evident in many professionals, he also reflects on underlying factors that are leading to change, not always for the better. He believes that professional training of an ever widening field of recruitment, lays insufficient emphasis
on the vocational aspects of the traditions of practice. Lawyers have a powerful position in society, and if the vocational aspect of the profession which is traditional, is neglected, the profession merely becomes a powerhouse for self advancement. Where the vocational aspect is lacking, the powerhouse syndrome can take over, and this does no good to the profession or the society that it serves.

These days Mr Triay no longer runs the practice, a role he handed over to the partners of Triay &Triay, five of whom are his own sons. He says Triay & Triay is a very different firm to the one that he used to run in his prime, “which was almost a one-man band.” One of the oldest law firms in Gibraltar, Triay & Triay’s staff of over 30 lawyers with offices in Gibraltar and Spain are active across many areas of law ranging from commercial, finance and admiralty to property, insolvency, private client work and criminal litigation.

“I’m not organizational so I’m very happy that I’ve got partners, five of whom are my own sons, that have been able to bring this practice into the modern world, because it might otherwise have died of traditionalism,” Mr Triay says, smiling.

“It is a different beast, but it’s a changing world.”

Mention J.E. Triay in Gibraltar and, inevitably, the conversation will at some point turn to politics. Mr Triay was one of a group of local lawyers and businessmen who, under the pseudonym ‘The Doves, advocated a settlement with Spain in the late 1960s, to furious and violent reaction in Gibraltar.

Mr Triay has since adjusted his views on the Gibraltar question, at least in part. He no longer believes, for example, that Gibraltar is sufficiently self-dependent to seek autonomy. But he still believes that Gibraltar, as a community of 30,000 people attached to a country of 46m people with which it must live, must seek agreement of some sort with Spain. “I think that above all, the biggest priority that Gibraltar can have is a settlement with Spain,” he says. “If Spain wants to forget its sovereignty claim over Gibraltar, well, even that doesn’t solve our problem, which is one of dependence on Spain anyway. We’ve still got to do that on terms that both Gibraltarians and the Spaniards are happy with and in order to ensure Gibraltar can survive. Therefore a settlement, to me, is absolutely essential.” He qualifies that position in that he is a staunch advocate of the English legal system, which he says must be preserved. “But I am convinced that there is nothing in what I call ‘Gibraltarianism’ that is not available from Spain.”

He believes that economics should be the real driver to resolving the Gibraltar question. He reflects, for example, on how Gibraltar has lost its prominence in key areas of economic activity in the past decades. The Rock used to be the leading airport for southern Spain, for example, the main port in the region and its principal shopping destination too.

“We’ve lost that, and what do we have today?” he asks. “Gambling and the finance centre, all artificial businesses which we could lose overnight. It’s a very serious situation. So what is the economic future of Gibraltar? The economic future of Gibraltar is to forget our politics and get on with our economy. We’re over-politicised in Gibraltar. We have trained people to think that they can eat and drink politics. And they can’t.”

In explaining why the GSLP/Liberal government had called a halt to work on major capital projects during the first week of January, Dr Joseph Garcia, the Deputy Chief Minister, said it was a question of priorities. He argued that the former GSD administration had focused on certain projects in a bid to win votes ahead of the general election last December, in particular the air terminal and the tunnel. But “…there are plenty more projects like the new KGV hospital and the Alzheimer’s and dementia home which are of more urgent social need to the community and which should have been come first,” Dr Garcia said. “Instead the previous Government chose to pump millions and millions of pounds into the tunnel and the air terminal. The fact that labour was withdrawn from other sites in order to open the air terminal for public viewing before the general election is proof enough that the priorities of the previous administration were of an electoral nature.”

The GSLP/Liberal administration is now assessing each of those projects individually before deciding whether to push ahead with them and, if so, at what pace. The focus will be on social and healthcare schemes. Although the government will complete the air terminal – “It’s already there and we have to try and make it work, even though we would clearly not have gone down that road” Dr Garcia said – the future of the tunnel is less clear.

Underlying the assessment of these projects is the Government’s view that public finances are not as healthy as the GSD would have had Gibraltar believe in the run-up to the election. Less than two months since the change of government, the economy has already provided fodder for bitter exchanges in Parliament and the media.

The opening volley came from Chief Minister Fabian Picardo, who in a televised address said the national debt was higher than had previously been acknowledged. Gross debt was £520m, not £480m as stated in the last budget. Net debt was £286m, not £220m as previously thought. In effect, it meant the new administration had cash reserves of just £20m, the Chief Minister said. Among the issues Mr Picardo raised was the fact that government-owned companies owed £87m that should have been repaid into the central coffers this financial year but which will, in reality, increase to over £100m by the end of March. Not only that, the previous government had forecast capital expenditure running into tens of millions of pounds, even without including vital new schemes like the power station. The only way those projects could be financed, Mr Picardo said, was by increasing the legal limit on public borrowing, something that the GSLP/Liberal had vowed not to do.

“We are committed to reducing the gross debt and to keeping the net debt within existing legal limits and eventually providing an even lower limit for the debt in relation to the reserves,” he said. “We believe that is the only prudent way to manage [Gibraltar’s] money. We will not, therefore, break our electoral commitment by bringing measures to Parliament to increase debt. We shall find alternative ways of addressing this problem. We are not prepared to run up the debt to much higher levels to deliver the projects of the administration that [Gibraltar] have rejected. Full details of our policies in respect of each of these pending projects will be given in the near future as each of them is assessed on a value for money basis.”

Unsurprisingly, the Chief Minister’s analysis drew a sharp rebuke for the leader of the Opposition, who accused him of making “…confused, false and misleading statements and innuendoes about the state of the economy and of the Government’s finances.” GSD leader Peter Caruana said Gibraltar’s current net debt stood at 27% of gross domestic product, a healthy ratio by any standard. “That is very probably the lowest level of public debt of any country in Europe,” Mr Caruana said. “Importantly, the levels of Government income continue to rise, unlike in most other countries where Government income has fallen sharply. That is the state of the public finances of Gibraltar, the envy of most of Europe.” He said Gibraltar was on for a record budget surplus this year and that although sales of government properties had been slower than anticipated because banks had tightened on lending, that was no longer the case and income would flow accordingly. Mr Caruana said Mr Picardo had presented a distorted picture in order to“…wriggle out of having to deliver on his many, irresponsible and unaffordable electoral promises and manifesto commitments…”

The attack from the Opposition leader led to a rebuttal from the Chief Minister, who said Mr Caruana had accepted the accuracy of the Government’s figures and “in essence” accepted the substance of its arguments. He said the GSD leader was trying to hide from the shortfalls of his administration, not just on the economy but on the way it had prioritised spending. “As he is doing in relation to the reality of the recent disclosures now catching up with him, the Leader of the Opposition is simply trying to hide from the effects of the truth,” Mr Picardo said. “We will not allow him to pretend that black is white.”