This is all so cheap and tacky, isn’t it?
‘I’ve won. Now we can start selling passports and making some easy money.”
Not even Italy, Spain, Greece and Cyprus, reduced to their uppers by economic collapse, began hawking their passports round the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and China, selling EU citizenship and freedom of movement in Europe to the lowest bidder.
Yet the prime minister is thrilled to bits – he had described the sale of Maltese citizenship, to a Bloomberg interviewer, as “exciting” – because he plans to net “Eur30 million this year” from the sale of Maltese citizenship to “65 applicants”.
Allow me a ‘told you so’ moment here. It couldn’t have been more obvious, from the way things were done, that the requests for Maltese passports came first, and the legislative framework has been made to accommodate them. Why else would the prime minister already have 65 people lined up for a Maltese passport?
I would hazard a guess – an educated guess – that these Maltese passports were bought and paid for already before the general election, and so the legislation has to go through, come what may, and no matter the storm kicked up by the public.
I am rather taken aback by how upset people are by it all. The money is almost an irrelevance: Muscat and Mallia can begin selling Maltese passports for several million each, and people would still be mortally offended. It’s the principle of the thing. It makes me want to have a sticker printed for my passport: NO. I DID NOT BUY THIS.
And that it should be Labour that’s doing it? Labour, with all its talk of nationalism, and national pride, and ‘Malta tal-Maltin’ and ‘jien kburi li jien Malti’ and ‘jien Malti u nitkellem bil-Malti. And now it’s selling off Maltese passports to Azerbaijanis and Tajikistanis for 25,000 euros a piece.
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The problem with labour is their lack of sense of what constitutes national identity.
For them to fight for Malta meant: to integrate us with the UK, to have an English name for their party for many many years, to celebrate the British troops’ departure after negotiating an extension of their stay in Malta, to make secret agreements with North Korea, and lastly to fight against Malta’s membership of the EU.
Given that in ALL of Malta’s historic decisions they ALWAYS got it wrong, to make up for it they come up with silly options that they think will make up for all the real great opportunities of history that they always missed because of their gross misreading of history. Thank God they were not around in the Great Siege.
Who is going to do the due diligence? Who will check that the €650,000 come from licit sources?
Probably the same guys who carried out the due diligence on Shiv Nair’s appointment as consultant to the government of Malta.
650,000 euros buys you a piece of Malta taghna lkoll.
Our pm seems to be making agreements with everyone, from the local kaccaturi, the developers to china, n.korea and corrupt businessman. And now even managed to find a way how to sell our pride our nationality?
How are WE going to support all his promises. Because it’s we the tax payer who so far is going to fork out the expenses of all the new boards from stamp licking to Las Vegas trips.
What happened to Gensna’s chant of : “Mitna ghalxejn…mitna ghall-barrani…”? What a joke, now we give our treasured citizenship away, what an utter disgrace and still there are blind people out there, unbelievable.