“These are the practices of a banana republic which must be rigorously counteracted within the EU” – Luxembourg MEP on Malta’s sale of EU citizenship to 700 ex USSR citizens, Chinese and Middle Easterners
If you have time while on holiday to read just one article today, it should be this one in the Brussels-based news portal, Politico.
It begins:
Malta has issued hundreds of passports to non-EU nationals in exchange for huge sums of cash over the last two years, resurrecting concern that the country is effectively selling access to the European Union.
The passports were granted to wealthy individuals who made large donations to the government and dropped cash to buy property on the Mediterranean islands without being required to live there.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s spokesman Kurt Farrugia said almost 700 passports have been issued to non-EU nationals since the program’s launch in 2014. Those passports have so far generated at least €200 million for Malta. Farrugia was responding to questions from POLITICO after the government released a list of more than 900 people granted Maltese citizenship last year.
That’s right – they’ve sold passports to 700 people from Russia, China, the Middle East, and a few random US citizens with major problems, like this one. Then there is the Chinese aluminium industry billionaire who we are expected to believe lives in a tiny nondescript flat in a Naxxar sidestreet. And of course, the Vietnamese member of parliament who was fired after her colleagues discovered that she is now actually Maltese.
And here are some sample Russians who are now Maltese. There are some more here, and they include, ridiculously, Tatler’s Moscow edition’s Babe of the Month for November 2012.
“If I didn’t have a great deal of love and sympathy as well as respect for Malta as a country, I would say what I was inclined to say two years ago: These are the practices of a banana republic which must be rigorously counteracted within the EU,” Frank Engel, a centre-right MEP from Luxembourg, told Politico.
And what has become of those €200 million which Kurt Farrugia told Politico that “Malta” has acquired from selling citizenship so far? Where are they? David Curmi, who chairs the agency which is supposed to receive and administer the money, still has no idea. Three years after the scheme began, there is still no sign of the money.
