Tonio Fenech

Tonio Fenech (born May 5, 1969 in Birkirkara ) is a Maltese politician of the Nationalist Party and was Minister of Finance until March 10, 2013.

biography

Fenech is the second son of attorney Joe Fenech , who was a member of the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1996 and who served as Attorney General in the Fenech Adami Third Cabinet from 1992 to 1995 . After completing school at St. Aloysius' College in Birkirkara , he studied at the University of Malta , graduating with honors with a Bachelor of Arts (Commerce) in Management and a Bachelor of Commerce in Tax Consulting. He then joined the tax consultancy firm Pricewaterhouse Malta in 1993 , where he initially worked for five years in the audit and business consultancy department. In 1998 he was appointed agent for a number of clients from the tourism, manufacturing and financial services sectors. Most recently he was a Fellow of the Institute for Tax Consultancy and a Senior Management Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. In this role, he led a series of consultancy negotiations, internal control reports and project management services for a large number of private industrial companies and the public sector.

In addition to his professional career, Fenech began his political career in March 1997, when he was elected as a candidate for the Partit Nazzjonalista (Nationalist Party) in the local elections to be a member of the city council of his native Birkirkara, the largest municipality in Malta. Within the Nationalist Party, he became a member of the Executive Committee of the Party School for Local Representatives (Nationalist Party College of Councilors) in April 1998 and General Secretary of this school in April 1999. In October 1998 he was elected mayor of Birkirkara and held this office until April 2003, when he had to resign as mayor after being elected to the House of Representatives . In addition, he was a member of the board of directors of the housing authority between October 1998 and April 2003 and a member of the commission for the introduction of e-government from April 2001 to April 2003 .

In the 2003 parliamentary elections , he was elected to represent constituency 8 . At the same time he was appointed by the government as an observer at the European Parliament .

After Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi took office in March 2004, he was appointed Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Finance in its first cabinet and thus Gonzi’s closest collaborator, who also held this office. In this role he had a decisive influence on Malta's entry into the euro zone . In addition, he was involved in fulfilling the EU convergence criteria of Maastricht and the successful conclusion of the contracts to build the Mater Dei Hospital in Msida , which will become the largest hospital in Malta in the future.

He was re-elected as a member of parliament in the 2008 general election. After the general elections in Malta in 2008 , he was appointed on March 12, 2008 by Gonzi as his successor as Minister of Finance, Economy and Investment. Tonio Fenech was the youngest minister in Gonzi's second cabinet . Because of his role, he was also Governor of the European Investment Bank (EIB) for Malta. During his first year as Minister of Economic Affairs there was still slight economic growth . As finance minister, he called for those responsible for the current global financial crisis to be named and praised the agreement of the group of the twenty most important industrialized and emerging countries (G 20) on financial regulations.