The Prime Minister this morning promised greater government commitment to the Notarial Archives after being told during a visit that the facility needed urgent funding to conserve its precious documents.

Officials showed Dr Muscat around the archives this morning and explained that documents went back to the earliest time of the Knights in Malta, through to the French occupation, the British period and more recent times.

The prime minister joked that ‘nothing has changed’ when he was told that before the Knights arrived, Malta was a centre of human trafficking.

He was shown documents related to the allocation of plots during the building of Valletta and the wills of architect Glormu Cassar, among others. The officials stressed that some of the documents were in a bad state and urgent funding was needed for their preservation.

Dr Muscat was accompanied by, among others, Finance Minister Edward Scicluna and the Parliamentary Secretary for Justice Owen Bonnici.