Your Excellency, Ministers, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

How on earth do I live up to that?

Let me start by welcoming you to what will undoubtedly be my last financial services speech in this place as Chief Minister.

I can already see the relieved faces on some of the tables.

Don’t worry.

I’ve asked them to keep the doors locked until I’ve finished.

This is my thirteenth speech as Chief Minister at one of these events.

And, as I constantly say in Gibraltar, that number is lucky for some.

It’s the last time that you’ll have to listen to me all the way through to your cheeseboards.

But it is a long time since 2012, when I first addressed you.

Can I ask you to get into the DeLorean with me and go back to 2012?

David Cameron was Prime Minister in Downing Street.

As Albert reminded us, you’re winning on one thing.

Since then, we’ve only had one Chief Minister. You’ve had seven.

You’ll recall that one of those magnificent seven was outlasted by a lettuce.

I suppose that’s the sort of political price one pays in a turbulent period.

And in all that time, and despite everything that Albert has said so kindly (I was expecting a little gold statuette at the end of that), Gibraltar has also endured a lot of political storms.

In 2012, from this place, I told you that Gibraltar was not a hard place from which to do business.

I think I was right about that.

And many of you may have come to Gibraltar since and may now agree.

But the things that were happening around us were really hard.

A Eurozone crisis.

A frontier that could go from soft to hard in a heartbeat.

And then, in 2016, that bleeding referendum that Albert just reminded us of.

We all voted to remain, and the rest of the British public, with usual British politeness and sang froid, voted to leave.

When they came into my room the morning after the vote, ministers were saying, “What are we going to do?”

And at every financial services lunch since 2016 that I’ve turned up to here, you’ve been saying to me, “What’s going to happen with Brexit, Fabian?”

And I’ve been saying:

Don’t worry, certainty is coming.

Be patient.

Trust us in Gibraltar to deliver.

And I think it was getting to the stage where every time I said to you, “certainty is coming”, you were thinking to yourselves, “Oh, that’s how a Gibraltarian says mañana.”

Well, certainty is here now.

On the 14th of July this year, we signed the Treaty in Brussels.

That same night, we pulled down what was left of the physical frontier between Gibraltar and the European Union.

And then we did something really difficult.

The Gibraltar Parliament unanimously endorsed the terms of that agreement.

Now, those of you who know Gibraltar a little bit will know that getting unanimity in the Gibraltar Parliament is about as rare as finding parking on Main Street.

But we’ve done it.

And we have a treaty structure that gives us legal certainty to last.

It protects the over 15,000 cross-frontier workers.

That’s almost half our workforce.

It protects the millions of people who come to Gibraltar to see us every year, also a hugely important part of our public revenue.

And all of that without conceding anything in respect of sovereignty.

The perfect ingredients to alchemise Brexit into something positive.

Last year, not here but at Mansion House, I told you that the Treaty we were designing would turn Brexit into ploughshares.

Well, the ploughshare is ready.

The time has now come to plough.

Now, I know all you City guys and girls here prefer numbers to political poetry.

So let me take you through some of the numbers that Albert talked about and tell you what I think they mean.

I have tripled the GDP of Gibraltar in my time in office.

We’ve tripled the size of the economy.

I don’t need to blow my own trumpet. Albert’s done that already.

But it’s also worth me telling you this.

On my table today is the former Chief Minister, Sir Peter Caruana.

In his 15 years in office, the GDP went from about £350 million to £1.1 billion.

It tripled then, too.

I used to hate hearing you use that figure.

You used to sit me somewhere in the corner and I’d have to listen to this just before a general election in Gibraltar.

And I remember thinking to myself, how on earth am I going to triple 1.1?

He’s got me on that one.

I’ll never match him on that.

I’m about to step down as Chief Minister of Gibraltar.

Not from the podium, from the office.

Can you afford not to be in Gibraltar, if you’re not already there, if Gibraltar is about to start another period of tripling its GDP?

Good things come in threes in Gibraltar.

Peter also tripled the revenue, from £100 million to just over £300 million.

We’ve tripled it again, to just below £900 million.

GDP per head has gone to £80,000, third in the world.

Our insurers now write one third of the motor insurance written in the United Kingdom.

Our gaming industry takes two thirds of all of the bets taken in the United Kingdom.

The threes just keep coming.

And we’re also no slouch when it comes to standards of regulation.

We built the first bespoke regulatory framework for distributed ledger technology when most regulators were still trying to spell the word “blockchain”.

The Gibraltar Authorisation Regime is your London Bridge, thanks to Sir Bob, who is sitting here with us also.

And unlike the one in the nursery rhyme, this London Bridge ain’t falling down any time soon.

But in 2016, despite Brexit, I told you that this lunch was about what Gibraltar was going to be, not what it was.

So let me finish my address today, my last address to you, looking into the future.

As a STARTER FOR TEN, name me one other jurisdiction on continental Europe that offers you all of this at once:

The English common law, with final appeals to the Privy Council in London.

English as the language of business.

Sterling as the currency.

Regulation aligned with the United Kingdom, with access to the UK market.

And now, no physical frontier with the Schengen area.

A services market with the UK, and the goods and people deal with the EU.

Take your time.

Another glass of wine.

Mull it over.

But I can tell you, there is only one answer.

Gibraltar is the only place where British businesses can sit under British law, with an open Europe on the doorstep and Africa on the near horizon.

Insurers, come for the stability.

Fund managers, come for the speed to market.

Fintech founders, come for regulators who actually answer the phone.

Family offices, come for the safety, the security, the sun and the schools.

And all of that in a jurisdiction that follows not just one golden rule, but two:

We never spend more than we can collect.

And we triple the size of our economy every 15 years.

My successor can feel the pressure already.

I should, in fairness, add that there are some things that we cannot do.

Our most famous residents, the Barbary macaques, have absolutely no respect for property rights, regulation or anything else.

But they are the only part of Gibraltar that resists regulation.

Ladies and gentlemen, on the night I was first elected, I said that a new red dawn had broken.

For me, that dawn was in 2011, and the political twilight beckons at last.

For you as investors, the new dawn is now, the first full year of certainty that Gibraltar has known in a generation.

So I’m leaving the podium.

But I’m not leaving Gibraltar.

And I’m looking forward to doing business with colleagues in the City.

So next time you see me, I may be on your side of the table.

Please, be gentle.

I’m a little rusty on boilerplate clauses, and I’m only just starting to learn how to use AI.

But until we meet again, either in a boardroom or in a data room somewhere in this place, thank you for 15 years of friendship and support for Gibraltar.

And for some very good lunches once a year.

And remember:

Gibraltar will forever be standing proud.

Forever growing.

Forever delivering.

And whatever comes next, I think we may just be on the cusp of another tripling.

Don’t miss out.

See you in Gibraltar.