What makes a country prehistoric? Not selling its passports. What makes it cutting-edge? Selling its passports.
Joseph Muscat, quoted in Malta Today, defending his decision to sell Maltese passports (and sell them cheaply at that):
This is the difference between a prehistoric economy and one which looks ahead. We have to choose whether to be the last ones to wake up… or be on the frontline just as we were back in the 1990s when we launched our financial services industry,” Muscat said.
I bet there are lots of people I know who are looking at him now and wondering how in God’s name they ever took him seriously or saw him as good news for Malta.
In that statement, the prime minister actually equates the development of Malta’s financial services sector to selling Maltese passports to non-EU citizens who want to become EU citizens.
Watch out: someone who voted for this mess might be standing in a supermarket queue near you. Stand well away, because you really don’t want to be catching a bad case of inflammation of the brain.
Why bother with financial services at all? Just sell a couple of million Maltese passports. None of those people are going to be living here anyway, because you can bet that it’s next stop, Milan, London or Paris.
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What if Cyprus wakes up one day to smell the coffee and starts to sell its passports at €600,000? Will GuziPL revise his price down or introduce an offer such as buy 2 passports and get 1 free?
In my youth, the Labour phrase was ‘ixtri Malti’; one generation later, Muscat has instead sold Malta.
Il-gvern Malti ser jibda jinnegozja il-passaporti .
Ma nifilhux naqghu aktar ghan-nejk ma ta’ madwarna.
Mintoff qed jitqalleb fil-qabar.
Lanqas hu, ta’ hanzir li kien, ma waqa’ daqshekk fil-baxx.
Hekk ried il-Poplu Malti.
U hekk gara.
Poplu tan-nejk.
Pajjiz qahba.
So basically Joseph Muscat has found a way to never have a budget deficit.
If Edward Scicluna comes up with a hole in the budget, Muscat will call Manwel Mallia, telling him how many passports he needs to sell to plug the hole. Then, with some hard selling if necessary, the budget will be balanced.
Why exactly did Joseph Muscat allow Malta to go into the excessive deficit procedure when he had this miraculous
solution?
“So basically Joseph Muscat has found a way to never have a budget deficit.”
Actually if he legalized cannabis and taxed the bejesus out of it in a government monopoly he would have been further ahead.
That would also increase tourism and sell more Twistees.
A Mulej Hudni government.
I still forecast, my friend, that little Joey will lose the plot far in advance of Sant in 1998. In fact, he’s already lost it. So sad for Malta.
Yes but Harry, the man has a 10-seat majority in parliament. Pigs would have to fly and hell would have to sprout glaciers for an election to happen.
So now he has the gall to compare his bright idea to the setting up of a financial services industry which transformed our economy from one based on manufacture to one based on services. What a dangerous idiot.
The Nationalists managed to drag the country from the merde Labour had drowned it in to become a respected financial centre. Muscat and his incompetent colleagues appear to be determined to turn it into a pariah state.
Minn izra’ u rabbi ghal rabbi u hallas.
This man is even more crazy and dangerous than I thought (and that is saying something).
Does he honestly think that the whole of Malta is made up of the Labour sheep who wave the Labour flag under his podium, like someone so aptly put it in a comment in one of your previous posts?
Does he honestly think that we are swallowing this rubbish he is dishing out?
Does he honestly think that because he managed to fool so many people with his election campaign lies, he can feed us anything now and keep believing him (for those who believed anyway, thank God I was not one of them).
We are back to the times when all of us were ashamed to produce our green passport at security checkpoints. Back then it was considered as having a Libyan passport, now ….. A Chinese / Azeri one.
Cheaper for Maltese men and women to sell a marriage of convenience.
Been going on for ages.
With every passing day, I’m convincing myself more and more that I should leave this rock at the first opportunity I get, before it becomes much worse.