Top comment: “While many countries have residence and citizenship for investor schemes none, I think, are quite so brazenly crooked or venal as this one.”

Posted by Steve M:

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.