It’s too late already: the damage to Malta’s reputation has begun to snowball. Now Maltese passports are being advertised on a Pakistani website.
Maltese passports are being sold already (presumably on a sub-agency basis for Henley & Partners?) on a website run by a Pakistani law firm, HF corporation.
This is from the ‘About Us’ section on that website:
HF Corporation was formed under the patronage of Mr. M. Arshad Virk, who is a senior advocate of Supreme Court & High Courts of Pakistan and has vast experience in immigration & legal matters.
Mr. Arshad Virk is currently a member of
Pakistan Bar Council
Supreme Court Bar Association
High Court Bar Association
Punjab Bar Council
Lahore Bar Association
Dr. M. Hussain Farooq, CEO of HF Corporation a young and enthusiastic professional devoted to provide the best possible immigration solutions to the clients matching their future goals and life plans.
Through his International relations & exposures, HF Corporation has made collaborations with lawyers & many prestigious law firms around the world and provides complete services to clients for obtaining the residency and/or citizenship in these countries through business immigration and citizenship-by-investment programs.
————–
And this is how they are selling our passports:
The Maltese Citizenship-by-Investment Program offers majority of the benefits that most clients are looking for:
• Citizenship in a EU Member State that is stable, neutral and highly respected
• Reasonable requirements and efficient application process
• World’s strictest due diligence standards and vetting of applicants, thus ensuring only highly respectable applicants will be admitted
• Visa-free travel to more than 160 countries in the world, including the USA
• EU citizenship giving right of establishment in all 27 EU countries
Requirements:
Citizenship is granted to suitable individuals and families who qualify under the very strict due diligence regime and who make a significant contribution to the National Development Fund established by the Government. The minimum contribution levels that must be met in the initial phase of the program have been set as follows:
Contribution to National Development Fund for the main applicant: EUR 650,000
Contribution for spouse and minor children: EUR 25,000 each
Contribution for dependent children 18 to 25 years or dependent parents above 55 years: EUR 50,000 each
Furthermore, Due Diligence fees apply, and these have been set at the following levels:
For main applicant: EUR 7,500; For spouses, adult children and dependant parents: EUR 5,000;
For children between 13 and 18 years of age: EUR 3,000 each.
Contact us for more details on this prestigious and unique program.
29 Comments Comment
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http://www.hfcorporation.co/citizenship-by-investment-programs/malta/
kev’s been silent lately.
What about Afghanistan?
Would it be possible to know if this new IIP scheme allows for a change of name and or surname? ( identity change )
If the state can sell a passport, can I do the same?
Povera Malta taghna!
Heqq mhux hekk ried il-poplu,bidla ghall l-aghar.
It is unclear how much Henley & Partners are actually charging. The person who asked them for details was told their fee was €70,000. On this Pakistani website it’s €7500.
Does the fee change according to the continent?
[Daphne – The figure of €7500 is for due diligence. Maybe they got confused.]
I would also say that in those parts of the world where bargaining a price is more common, €70,000 would have been too much of a hefty figure to herald upfront: The client may have thought twice and double-checked to see if there was a middleman he could skip.
Taliban included?
Why aren’t the European authorities reacting to this? What is in it for say Italy, or Great Britain, Greece or Bulgaria?
What do ALL the EU members stand to gain out of this?
A Maltese passport isn’t a Maltese passport as we know it any longer. It is a European passport, a Schengen Area passport, and the EU needs to step in to disallow this sort of thing from happening.
It is not the individual Schengen countries’ remit to sell passports because the collective is affected.
Agree. My colleague’s reaction when I mentioned this scheme to him was “so is Malta targeting all the Russian oligarchs and other baddies? doesn’t the EU object to any of this?”
Another Taiwanese colleague of mine burst out laughing, adding “So is Malta short of money? This is the last thing you want to do, isn’t it?”
SHAME, SHAME, SHAME . I cannot find words to express my disgust.
I hope this news pricks the conscience of some Labour members of parliament and that they realise the unseen consequences of offering Maltese citizenship to all and sundry and that they have the guts to say NO, enough is enough.
So how is this company/person an Authorised Registered Mandatory?
We were informed that only these were being permitted to promote the scheme on behalf of Henley & Partners. Or does Henley & Partners have a total free hand as to who they can strike deals with and pawn Maltese citizenship to?
I have gone through the Labour Party’s electoral programme and I have not come across this irresponsible and shameful promise of selling Maltese passports.
There is not going to be anything left for any true Maltese citizen to be proud of.
This is daylight robbery of something so precious and unique that was naturally enshrined in our identity. You Mr Muscat and your accomplices have no right to do this and history will condemn you all for this travesty.
They seem to be trying to make it a lot more respectable than it’s going to be – “World’s strictest due diligence standards and vetting of applicants”, “…who qualify under the very strict due diligence regime” … And it’s a “prestigious and unique program(me)”.
But then they give you a bulk discount.
Perhaps Mubarak will be the cash-for-passort’s first client?
What a shame. How disgraceful. I wonder whether the signatories of the Schengen area and the USA homeland Department ever envisaged whether one of the said signatories was going to act in this way and actual boast about it.
Who knows, maybe the Pakistani Taliban are rethinking their strategy: Malta, the soft underbelly of the western alliance.
After years of very heavy, albeit sometimes justified, criticism of the Nationalist Party for the privatisation of state assets, the Labour Party has gone and done something much worse than selling off the family silver.
The indiscriminate sale of Maltese citizenship for the price of Eur650,000, in what is turning out to be a no-strings-attached transaction, comprises the dilution of our generally good reputation with the sale of each and every passport.
I wonder if the CIA is turning its attention this way.
In the past they have turned their attention and sent representatives over for less…
The concluding line hits it squarely on the head – it truly is an unexampled scheme.
So depressing…
And neither do these guys need authorisation to promote the scam, as they operate outside its territories. Any fly-by-night crooked backroom operation with a website can do what accredited financial agents in Malta are prohibited from doing.
So Jabba the Hut wants to spy on asylum seekers and refugees in Malta just in case they are terrorists who will murder us all in our beds, but selling our passports to possible would-be terrorists is fine, because they will be carrying out really strict due diligence just as they did with blacklisted Shiv Nair.
Utterly unbelievable and this just shows what a bunch of amateurs and thieves those switchers have given us.
I wonder what the Americans are thinking.
What do you expect? They’re thinking that a revision on the visa waiver scheme needs to be revised.
With Pakistan officially in the loop and with full confidentiality guaranteed, what is stopping Al Qaeda from buying a few passports. It is significantly better to have a legal document than a forged one.
Finance minister Edward Scicluna said lately “We will not sell the family silver” – but that is exactly what they are doing.
Selling the family jewels
To think what we went through in order to acquire EU membership – the endless negotiations, the shameful, despair-inducing freeze in 1996, the renewed attempt in 1998, against all odds the unprecedented, stupendous triumph in 2004, the acquisition of gradually increasing respect and status in the years that followed …only to be reduced to pimping all we have achieved to anyone who can stump up the cash.
Nigeria will follow