Dropping the secrecy clause? They can’t just do it. Only parliament can undo that.

Joseph Muscat and his hand-puppet

Look at this timeline of events.

The government tries to legislate at speed to sell Maltese citizenship to individuals whose identity is kept secret.

To do this, it has to rescind the legislation making it mandatory for the government to publish, in The Government Gazette every three months, the names of those who become Maltese citizens during that period.

The Opposition fights against this. The government stands its ground, calling the Opposition “negative” and “jealous” and saying that secrecy is essential to its plans.

Parliament votes on the Citizenship Bill, including the secrecy clause. All members of the government benches vote in favour of the entire bill and its secrecy clause, except for two who are overseas on government business. Louis Grech votes in favour of secrecy. The prime minister votes in favour of secrecy. They all do.

The president of Malta signs the bill into law. The Citizenship Sale law is now in force, including its secrecy clause. It is now possible for the government to grant citizenship by whatever means – naturalisation through bloodline or against payment, or even for free – to whomsoever it pleases without the rest of us finding out. Not only is it not mandatory to publish the names, but it is actually ILLEGAL to do so.

Six days after voting in favour of secrecy, Louis Grech, through the medium of Malta Today, announces that the government will be dropping the secrecy clause and that he has talked the prime minister, over the phone to Sri Lanka, into agreeing with him.

Times of Malta then rings Louis Grech and he tells them the same thing.

What he does not say is that the government cannot simply drop the clause because it is not a legal notice. The government must take the matter back to parliament for another debate and another vote.

There is something else which Grech did not say until pressed to do so in parliament during a debate on his budget allocation earlier today: what the government plans to do between now and then. Is it going to sell 60 passports to the pound-of-flesh applicants, in secret, and only after that take the secrecy clause back to parliament to have it undone, people wondered?

Grech said that this will not happen. The government will not use the time-window to do this, he said. I, however, do not believe him. There have been far too many lies.

My view is this: that these are the very same people who hid from the electorate their plans to sell Maltese citizenship, and while they put all sorts of minor details about fashion and garages for bands into their electoral programme, they did not put a major, fundamental issue like the sale of citizenship.

If people like Louis Grech and Joseph Muscat have no qualms or conscience about hiding the sale of citizenship from the people who voted for their party, springing it on them by surprise once they took their votes to get into power, then it follows that they will have no qualms or conscience about selling passports in secret even when they say they won’t.

The secrecy imperative appears to have come from one particular group: the group to whom Labour promised passports before the election, in return for services rendered. When Grech announced the U-turn on the secrecy clause, I thought to myself: “As if – there’s no way they’re ever going to publish a list of 60 to 100 Chinese names in a single issue of the Government Gazette. They must have something up their sleeve.”

What they had up their sleeve, of course, was a ‘kunnink plenn’: stand their ground on secrecy until it got through the vote and became law, then announce that they have seen the light, so that people are kept quiet. Meanwhile, while the secrecy clause is in force, sell passports to the pounds-of-flesh applicants in secret, then take the clause back to parliament to have it rescinded.

What they have created here is a legal time-window in which they can sell passports in secret to those they have to, then when that is done, take the clause back to parliament to have it lifted and be acclaimed as a government that listens.

And even if Louis Grech says it’s not going to happen, I don’t believe him. Somebody who voted Labour throughout the worst of the Mintoff years when the country had become a human rights sink-hole, and who has no excuse because he had an education, by definition has little or no integrity no matter what good company he might have been before he became old, ill and a convenient replacement for Anglu Farrugia in the Partit tal-Liars.