**TikTok Deal: How a US-China Framework Could Reshape Malta’s FYP** Sliema influencer Martina Pace woke up yesterday to 300 fewer followers on TikTok. “At first I panicked—did I shadow-ban myself with too many pastizzi mukbangs?” she laughs, adjusting her ring-light outside Balluta Bay. Then she read the push-alert: Washington and Beijing had sketched a preliminary…
**APS Bank’s €45 Million Rights Issue: A Quiet Revolution in Malta’s Financial Heart** Valletta’s Republic Street was still yawning itself awake on Tuesday when APS Bank dropped the kind of news that makes the city’s limestone walls hum: a €45 million rights issue, the largest in its 105-year history, aimed at reinforcing its capital buffers…
US TikTok Deal Edges Closer: What a Ban-or-Sale Could Mean for Malta’s 300,000-Strong User Base By Hot Malta Staff Valletta – When US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on Sunday that Washington is “very close” to a final agreement forcing TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to sell or face a nationwide ban, the headline…
**CrediaBank Probe: Maltese Shareholder Speaks Out, Island Waits for Fallout** A Maltese shareholder in the embattled CrediaBank has broken his silence, confirming he is part of an ongoing international probe but insisting he is “confident” he will not face trial. The statement, delivered in a carefully-worded video released to Hot Malta late Tuesday night, is…
Alexander Demarco, the softly-spoken lawyer who has spent the last seven years whispering monetary policy into the Prime Minister’s ear, is odds-on to become the next Governor of the Central Bank of Malta when Governor Edward Scicluna’s non-renewable term expires in June. The whispers started in Valletta’s coffee houses, migrated to the law courts of…
Valletta wakes up to news of war-on-rails: how a double train derailment in Russia is already rippling through Malta’s tight-knit streets. The first Telegram clips—filmed by shaken conductors—reached Maltese phones at 06:14 CET: two freight trains, 1,200 km apart, jumping their tracks in Bryansk and Ryazan, flames licking winter pine forests, one driver dead, grain…
**Lab-Grown Diamonds Sparkle in Malta While Southern Africa Loses Its Lustre** *How Sliema’s jewellery quarter is unwittingly fuelling a crisis 7,000 km away* On a humid July afternoon, the plate-glass windows of Tower Road sparkle like a pirate’s chest. Inside, a young Maltese couple hover over a white-gold ring set with what looks like a…
**Half-priced luxury? How Malta’s flash-sale culture is rewriting the island’s love affair with the high-end** Sliema’s once-quiet Bisazza Street has become a nightly catwalk of brown paper bags. Not the greasy sort from pastizzi, but the matte-laminated kind that used to be reserved for Paris or Milan. Walk past the new pop-up “premium outlet” that…
**Watch: HSBC Malta deal sealed in two weeks – CrediaBank shareholder** In a whirlwind fortnight that has left Malta’s financial community breathless, HSBC Malta’s fate was sealed faster than most locals can finish a festa season. According to a CrediaBank shareholder who spoke exclusively to *Hot Malta*, the deal that will see the Spanish lender…
**From Knights’ Armour to Space Age: How Maltese Scientists Are Giving 3D-Printed Titanium a GLAM Make-Over** *By our science & culture correspondent* Valletta’s golden limestone façades have reflected every era—from the bronze cannons of the Knights to the carbon-fibre drones that now hover above Grand Harbour. Yet behind the baroque balconies a quieter revolution is…
Friction to Function: How Malta’s Engineers Turn Texture into Treasure Valletta’s 16th-century bastions are smooth to the eye but surprisingly grippy under a rubber-soled shoe. That silent grip—stone micro-ridges catching polymer peaks—is the same physics now guiding Maltese start-ups as they 3-D-print shark-skin textures onto yacht propellers and hospital door-handles. From Lascaris War Rooms to…
AI and Malta’s future – how the islands can surf the silicon wave without wiping out By [Hot Malta Staff] Smart traffic lights that speak Maltese, ferry timetables that rewrite themselves when the sirocco whips up the waves, a digital twin of Valletta that lets planners test pedestrian schemes before a single limestone block is…
