COMMENT OF THE WEEK
Posted by H. P. Baxxter:
Reading through these articles, from all over our fair continent, our hemisphere, and the Antipodes too, I can’t help noticing a few things.
Firstly, there is absolutely nothing in the Chinese press. I know because I checked. And why should there be? The press in China doesn’t deal in news, but in carefully-doctored government propaganda (as in: “China the best, all the rest are rubbish”). Those who need to know about the sale of passports already do. They’re the sixty families, all members of the inner circle of oligarchs and government officials.
Secondly, the seething anger of the ordinary European citizen is palpable. They feel cheated. How dare this pipsqueak country, which became an EU member a mere nine years ago, sell EU citizenship – OUR citizenship?
Thirdly, everyone knows about that forecast of Eur30 million. And it is evident to everyone that Malta is on the verge of bankruptcy and that this is a desperate measure.
Because make no mistake, that’s exactly how we come across.
This is one snowball that won’t stop until it’s an avalanche. The first to react will be the US government, which will, in all probability, revoke the visa waiver.
Then it will be the turn of international investors, who will look elsewhere for investment opportunities. Who would want to sink their money into a country that’s so desperate it’s selling passports to plug the budget hole?
Then, a few months down the line, we’ll see the international markets react, as our credit ratings go to rat-shit and government bonds start turning toxic. We’ll start to feel the effects on the national budget.
Economics is mostly about perception. About investor confidence. Malta has just gone before the world like a Monti hawker flogging off other people’s wares at bargain prices. For EU passports aren’t our own; they are the EU’s. Our own, without EU and Schengen membership, are worth jack shit.
Did I say economics? Make that international politics too.
The world didn’t smell the coffee. It smells a rat. Welcome once again to twenty years of nisthi nghid li jien Malti.
13 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
Amen. But of course we’ve been saying all this for the past month or so, haven’t we? Again, we were all accused of being paranoid and/or brainwashed and jumping to unfair conclusions.
But lo and behold, we were right again. Right, dear switchers, not brainwashed- right.
‘Thirdly, everyone knows about that forecast of Eur30 million. And it is evident to everyone that Malta is on the verge of bankruptcy and that this is a desperate measure.’
Negative socialist politics have resurfaced again. Selling passports is an extreme measure which betrays Muscat’s lack of confidence in the island’s resilience and potential of sustaining economic growth. Malta is bankrupt of ideas typical of inward lookng economic models.
Selling passports betrays Muscat’s pre-electoral commitment to China and China’s Communist Party officials.
I told you so.
While many countries have residence and citizenship for investor schemes none, I think, are quite so brazenly crooked or venal as this one.
The Caribbean passport-for-sale schemes are small scale and the benefits to the buyer restricted so the schemes themselves are modest and the risk to the selling countries is limited.
Malta on the other hand is a different story: the prize for the man with the cash is full citizenship of the EU (quite a prize and worth paying for) but the the risks to Malta are huge.
As an outsider with some affection for Malta I am sure this move will have a very damaging effect on the island’s reputation. As anyone with experience of commerce and manufacturing will tell you it takes decades to build a reputation for being trustworthy, reliable, decent and honest and just a reckless moment to throw it all away.
Doesn’t the government realise that membership of the Schengen zone and all visa waiver regimes will be gone in a flash? Not to mention the reputational damage that will be done to Malta as a financial centre – which is a business in which reputation is everything.
To make things worse I am certain that this scheme will not attract the hard-working, sincere, genuine investor that your PM wants everyone to think it will. For that kind of money they can settle in London or a hundred other places. This scheme is aimed at the desperate, those who simply couldn’t settle in a ‘respectable’ country – and here I’m thinking of various dodgy Serbs, Libyans, Syrians, South Africans, Colombians, Nigerians and a host of other ne’er-do-wells.
And if the identities of recipients of citizenship really will be kept secret what will not stop people using assumed names or, even worse, a sinister, but not so far-fetched, plot by a state to infiltrate its agents into the EU.
You can be sure that the EU and the USA have already thought of these things and will take steps to limit the damage to themselves – but what about the damage to Malta?
I’m afraid you’ll be stuck with a bad reputation for a long time and that will follow you around like B.O. Why risk so much? Why go down this road at all? You really have to wonder.
Gold star to you mate, spot on.
100% true, Baxxter. I was on the verge of securing an extremely good client. He was looking at setting up in Malta particularly because of its stability and good reputation. Still reeling from what happened in Cyprus, he is not so sure about making the jump to Malta now.
So the Maltese government and those pirates Henley & Partners are going to make a lot of money in the short term, but in the meantime they are destroying a carefully built reputation which will result in the loss of many more millions to Malta, much more than the Maltese government can make off this scheme.
What a mess. What fools Muscat and Mallia are. Perhaps I am being too kind and they are not just fools but corrupt bastards.
There must be something in it for them too. How else can one explain the speed with which this has happened so soon after the election when it was not mentioned in the electoral programme.
Yuck, what muck is running our country.
Well argued – this is the result of the rampant nouveau riche culture exemplified in Joseph and Michelle Muscat, who were voted in by people who share their shallow, materialistic values.
They see the price of everything and the value of nothing. They put a price on Maltese passports and rammed Malta’s value down the drain.
The Prime Minister got to power on the strength of the majority of Maltese who can think only in terms of patronage and have no sense or understanding of the public good.
Let’s try not to make the same mistake at the European Parliament elections. It does not mend things, but it will surely send a message, hoping to clear Malta’s name.
We must not miss a vital point here.
All those reports in the international media refer to the figure of Eur30 million which prime minister Joseph Muscat told them he expects to get from selling Maltese citizenship.
The international media then logically concluded that Malta is bankrupt if it has resorted to this to bring in Eur30 million.
We have to bear in mind that Eur30 million is roughly what this government needs to keep its promise of cutting water and electricity bills.
It has wreaked havoc on Malta’s hard-won international reputation and created the false impression that we are bankrupt and selling passports to keep our heads above water, just to keep a wild and untenable electoral promise he made to get into power.
This is a disaster. We knew that our cheaper utilities bills would have to come at a very high price, but nobody imagined how high it would be.
These people are utterly irresponsible, and incompetent.
It is a disaster, ciccio. There are no other words to describe it. Today we have woken up and it seems that nothing has changed.
Our electricity bills haven’t changed. We still have our job at the office or factory. The price of a cup of coffee is still the same.
That’s exactly why it’s such a disaster. Because it’s the sort that is felt when it’s too late, like cancer.
Just you wait. Wait a few months. Mark my words, we’ll be begging for a bailout before these five years are over.
Rahal made a good point. This has Edward Scicluna’s stamp all over it. It’s his sort of policy, his idea of economics. I know because I studied every single report, every scrap of writing he ever produced since graduating.
And it’s all there.
The only thing he can’t do now is devaluation. He must be pretty miffed because it’s one of the favourite tools in the arsenal of any 1970s post-colonialist economist. Just like him.
Any disaster, any betrayal of a people, any institutionalised coup of this sort, starts in the halls of academia. I’ll never cease repeating this. Here’s a man who was labelled a genius and who no one dared challenge in forty years of sashaying from post to higher post. Il-Professur Edward Scicluna. Isa hej.
Now more than ever, Malta needs a solid core of intellectuals and academics defending economic liberalism and denouncing this despoliation of a country.
I know that Malta’s electorate is largely made up of pig-ignorant hamalli. So I know which way they vote. But for Joseph Muscat to sodomise a country without so much as a peep from our intellectuals just hurts. It hurts.
As always, I urge anyone who can to seek a second passport. These are dark times, my friends.
I agree, Baxxter.
You say that the Mintoffianomics Professor cannot do a devaluation, but you have to remember that he said that he will “strive as Minister of Finance” “to boost the Renminbi as an international currency.” I would say that’s the same as devaluing the Euro.
And have you seen his budget measures? They boil down to increasing labour supply, thereby putting pressure on wages and salaries. He is seeking to create employment by lowering the equilibrium price of wages and salaries.
He is shifting the entire labour supply curve to the right by changing work and unemployment conditions.
Forcing people into the work market – take away their benefits, subsidise the childcare from other people’s money. This is not less than reducing work to slavery. The Chinese way. It’s not “making work pay,” it’s making workers slaves at any price.
The key to European, and later Western, success, has always been entrepreneurship. Our friend Niall Ferguson was absolutely spot on here. It’s not as if we didn’t have the historical precedent. Our, ahem, missirijiet, back in the carcru demmhom days, would pool their venture capital to fit out a ship for trading or privateering, and they created wealth that way. That is entrepreneurship and real economic liberalism.
Mintoff changed all that. He made the government the provider of everything, this effectively turning the people into its dependents. Entrepreneurship was killed off, and we were plunged back into – I won’t say the Middle Ages, because that was when the commenda was invented – back into an era that didn’t even exist.
The worst of it was that it happened right when citizen entrepreneurship was starting to bloom in Western Europe. Ordinary people started to buy stocks and shares and make wealth that way. Fast forward to 1987. You can’t change tack overnight, and Malta developed a very skewed version of economic liberalism, where capital is invested in non-wealth producing assets. Such as real estate.
Now look what happened. Did you see the list of properties put up for sale by Maltee banks, a few months ago? Bingo. The banks are calling in the loans.
The rest of Europe has moved on and we’re still stuck with Mintoffianomics plus cheap money plus a few companies servicing the domestic market, where supply seems to be overtaking demand. In the last five years or so, there was a slow opening up for foreign markets. We were on the verge of a breakthrough, which depends on all those volatile things like reputation, credit ratings, quality of the workforce and simply being in the right place at the right time. We were even tinkering with new-fangled concepts such as energy efficiency, health insurance and trust funds.
Enter Joseph Muscat and it’s back to kitchen table Mintoffianomics.
But our cognoscenti, alas, obviously think otherwise.
Modernity, to put it plainly, is not a contract officialising your bond with the man you’re buggering.
Well put, Baxxter. It’s all about credibility and we are losing that in spades.
The ‘intelligentsia’ were conned in 1971, conned again in 2013 and no doubt their offspring will be conned again a number of decades down the line.
It must be genetic.
In the very near future a Maltese passport will carry the same cheap value as to when it was changed to GREEN in colour.
What a pity.