The point we’re all missing: Henley & Partners now has a vested commercial interest in keeping Labour in power against all odds
Jason Azzopardi is on record as having said that Henley & Partners probably financed Labour’s electoral campaign.
The odds are that the company did. It financed electoral campaigns in the Caribbean island states where it devised plans to sell passports, so there is no reason to believe that it has any scruples about doing the same in Malta.
The point that we are all missing is that this is now not about what Henley & Partners did in the last electoral campaign, but what it is doing now to ensure Labour is re-elected in 2018.
Henley & Partners had a vested interest in having Labour elected to government. Now it has a vested interest in keeping Labour in government for as long as possible, especially given that the restriction on the number of passports being sold has been removed.
The company has no chance of carrying on with the scheme under a Nationalist government. If the Nationalists are elected in 2018, Henley & Partners’ milk-teat of hundreds of millions of euros runs dry overnight.
So the question we must ask now is this. What guarantees are there that Henley & Partners will not interfere, directly or indirectly, in the electoral process when its business is built on the distortion and exploitation of democratic processes and solutions?
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I think they had a vested commercial interest in seeing josephmuscat.com in power, in the first place.
What can they do, other than financing Labour’s campaign, to remain in power?
They can advise their clients to vote Labour.
The Party Financing bill is now even more important, or am I too naive?
It is not necessary to directly finance a party in order to keep it in power.
Indeed. You can finance its rival, to neuter it.
Ask Caqnu.
Thank you Daphne, you have just voiced my worst fears. I am having nightmares that the Labour movement are going to be there for a very very long time.
Maybe not, maybe not – when you keep the company of snakes you have to be ready to be bitten, and I have a gut feeling that they will be bitten by their favourite pet snake.
Daphne says that when one allows oneself to be bought, one must accept the consequence, namely that one can also be sold further down the road – or something like that, insomma.
And I think Daphne is right.
Importantly too, what interest does “Henley and Something” (to quote the finance minister) have in carrying out thorough background checks on the passport applicants, their spouses, etc, etc, when they earn more money if the passports are issued?
And the Leader of the Opposition today missed out on this vital point too.
He also missed out on the fact that Muscat promised the right to vote to those who purchase a Maltese-EU passport.
Dr. Busuttil needs to come up with some serious and strong arguments in Parliament or outside it against the residence and voting clause; otherwise he is doomed to remain as Leader of the Opposition for a long time.
Well the truth is that since that famous speech at the EU we have not seen Edward Scicluna. He was not involved in any discussion about the sale of citizenship, which is very strange, given that he is the finance minister.
MaltaToday is already marking him as one of those who will be going down in the next cabinet reshuffle.
Will Mr. Kalin of Henley & Something be the new Minister of Finance in Joseph Muscat’s new cabinet?
Despite EU membership, Malta is perceived to be the quintessential banana republic without any deep-rooted fundamental democratic principles or behaviour. The press and institutions are weak.
Given that the country is run by people for whom everything has a price, you can’t blame Henley & Partners for taking advantage of that.
The Maltese electorate are so unsophisticated that they do not even notice that they will pay a high price for all this.
The Maltese electorate is so blinded with irrationality, fanaticism and ignorance that it cannot fathom that in fact it had switched from platinum (PN) to absolute rubbish (PL).
Henley and Partners’ Kalin was a member of the Malta government delegation that met with the European Commission following the vote in the European Parliament which condemned Muscat’s scheme.
What we had there was the government of an EU country accompanying a commercial organisation to a meeting with the EC as its lobbyist disguised as an EU member state. That is precisely the role in which Muscat sailed to the Caribbean conference a few months ago, and the Henley and Partners launch event in London before that.
In other words, the se up was and is a perversion of the normal order of things in a proper democratic setup.
And yet, the company’s presence in that delegation was treated by the media in Malta as though it was perfectly acceptable, and so it went by unquestioned.
Now Kalin is throwing his commercial weight around, condemning the political opposition in Malta – a constitutionally defined democratic power, unlike Henley and Partners – as though that too is perfectly acceptable.
The outcome of the meeting with the EC was a flimsy agreement to include a residency requirement. This has not been defined anywhere by government but, thanks to the good offices of Henley and Partners’ agents we now know that this means no residency requirement at all. A simple flying visit to Malta will suffice.
I’m so glad you reflected my exact thoughts. I cannot understand how NOBODY mentioned a word about all this ‘interference’ by Henley & Partners.
For Chris Kalin to form part of the government delegation in their meeting with the European Commission and then blatantly lay into the Opposition in Times of Malta seems scandalous. Yet yours is the first comment condemning this conduct that I have come across.
Is this what we have come to?
Was Henley & Partners there in Manwel Mallia’s place, in Louis Grech’s place or in Cris Cardona’s place?
It’s easy to say “Malta Government,” but where does this IIP scam actually fall?
I’m sure another enlightened Press Release in this regard will be faster in the rush to clarity than the terms of the “agreement” and their full implications.
No doubt, it will be “under Joseph Muscat?” And that, is the only reason for which funds go into a meta-mixed-use “Development Fund.” Not because the common good was in mind, but because to have such funds enter under one Ministry or another would be to lend definition to the blur he intended to play upon in order for this scam to go through at EU level.
Chris Kalin must have become the prime minister while we weren’t looking.
We are living in Kalingrad.
Chris Kalin accompanied the Maltese delegation to ensure that no concessions which could affect Henley and something’s future income were made. The Commission should have refused to allow a private individual with such a clear pecuniary interest to attend the meeting.
Which introduces the internal dilemma in Labour;
Absolving Muscat’s government of these leeches doesn’t mean he has to give up the scheme, it would in fact render it taghna lkoll right? The best ‘guarantee’ he can give.
Anything else implies he’s not willing to face the voter.
There will come a time when Muscat’s silence will run him over.
All these new clauses and changes, e.g. secrecy being ditched and the one year residency, are they going to be “back dated”, as it were?
As it stands, the passport sale is still on and has been on for a while, which gives all those Maltese hopefuls who were waiting for Labour to finally deliver, the chance to actually get what they want: an EU passport in secret.
How do we know that our beloved government isn’t already selling them to every Tom Dick and Harry?
I think that the reason why Labour are constantly dragging their feet on the issue, dragging Malta down with it, is because they need to hold out for as long as possible until all those who they promised a passport secretly get it secretly.
Plus, with the way they spin the PN’s objections to it, it kind of serves their ‘demonize PN’ campaign too, calling them traitors knowing full well that their supporters are unbelievably ignorant and would find such a label fitting.
Isn’t that why they need to keep their supporters ignorant anyway: because it means they can say things like this and use it? God forbid their supporters were no longer ignorant, an ignorant crowd is the only thing the PL know how to control and manipulate. They wouldn’t do well when their supporters are smarter than they are.
So will all the changes that have been promised apply to anyone who has been given a passport already? And don’t give me this nonsense of “No passports have been issued. We, the government, said we wouldn’t until the issue is resolved and would never go behind the country’s back because it serves us to”, because I think they bloody well have.
Their contract for a ten year period coincides exactly with two legislatures.
Good point.
If Joseph Muscat will be selling 1800 passports in the first 5 years, what will Henley & Something be doing under the contract in the second 5 years?
What does Joseph Muscat has up his sleeve for the second term?
They’ve lifted the cap on the number that can be sold and have now reverted to plan A: sell as much as possible, as soon as possible. Before it simply meant more money. Now, it means more votes.
Funny isn’t it, that the president of the Malta Developers Association, sitting in his office at the Labour Party HQ, and convinced he has no conflict of interest by doing that, has not yet protested in public about Henley & Partners’ unfair advantage in the sale of property to passport applicants.
Who says he doesn’t get anything out of this?
Exactly. Quite the experts at putting assets out of sight.
Jason Azzopardi asked an important question on Net TV yesterday. He asked whether there may be a huge break-up fee in the contract with Henley & Something.
Was a parliamentary question ever asked about this?
Jason Azzopardi asked this question in the context of the declaration by Mr. Kalin of Henley and Something, on PBS’s Reporter, that he was unwilling to publish the contract with the government, because it might harm the “national interest.”
But the existence of a break-up clause could be another reason why Joseph Muscat was so adamant that the program must go ahead. It could be that if the program had failed, he might have owed not only any campaign money to Mr. Kalin and his friends, but also a huge sum of contract break-up money.
It is inadmissible that the contract between Henley and Partners with the Labour Party initially and then with the Labour Party in Government, on which so much depended, has remained undisclosed.
I would like to know what Joaquin Almunia has to say on the score of Henley & Partners, their involvement from inception and the exclusive role handed them. Is there or is there not a situation of fair competition?
I understand that the social partners have now been called in to be used in destroying any potential claim of unfair competition; that Joseph Muscat expected to be attacked from the Financial Services angle that would have been more aligned with such reasoning.
This is my view:
Citizenship was discussed as a matter of national value, it gained phenomenal EU support as a national value with European impact in its second wider application, but when it came down to the negotiation, it was not brought to the table as a matter of national value in its own right as Citizenship, but as a Financial Services product.
The error of the Commission, if I may be so bold and since the full terms and implications of the negotiation have not yet been laid out and disclosed despite several requests from the Opposition, was to then accept to negotiate a Financial Services product under Citizenship terms and not Financial Services terms.
This was a new concept, and in the blur of its newness, I believe the EU has confused the fine but defining line between the two.
The two are not one.
Citizenship as it was hitherto known was not considered a Financial Services product until now.
What has happened is that old terminology has been applied to new territory.
The Financial Services Sector is more regulated.
The positioning and role of Henley & Partners is one that produces unfair competition within the local, EU and international market, and an impact on the wider EU and international territory (not market).
There is both a competition aspect, and a security aspect.
This Financial Services product is also selling benefits, such as access to other territories, that it has no right to sell. 560 votes against 22 told us this reasoning is correct.
The Government had first issued a statement a while back to “clarify” that this was not a “product.” The intention here, again, was to mislead.
It has now done the opposite and declared it a “product.”
When the Developers’ Association and the Estate Agency Groupings whipped up the emotions, and noise, both pre-election and post, it was to state that a Financial Services product responsible for creating investment was lacking. The words pushed through at all times – diverting attention from what was to follow and paving the way – were investment and employment. The same people attacking the scheme pre-election were at the London IIP launch.
Joseph Muscat has taken advantage of blurred boundaries, and confused the issue by attempting to redefine the boundaries himself in this fashion.
(He first embarrassed not only Malta, but the EU with a national issue he was asked several times by the Opposition to back down from and obviously he didn’t. Using that embarrassment caused to press for what he believes is a quick close to the issue.)
The two issues, although there is a delicate but firm line separating them, are not one.
The EU has both decided that selling a passport is wrong as a national and European value (560 votes vs 22), and – a few days later – that this new Financial Services product, so central to the Labour Government’s financing, can be sold.
Well I, as a Maltese citizen, feel cheated that there was no mention of either the intended change to the definition of “citizenship,” nor of the intended sale of this citizenship as a Financial Services product in the Labour election campaign and that Labour are governing on the back of this deceit.
I also feel cheated that the EU Commission has to-date failed to address the issue with the depth of reflection required and demanded by the European Parliament.
Relying on “good faith” is not the point. Nor is it enough. Too much damage, irreversable or not, risks taking place meanwhile. Human rights should dictate that one does not rely on “good faith” but on clear and reflected guidelines that take into account the wishes of the Member States through their EPs.
I would like to press on further and ask the current European Commissioner for Competition, whether he is satisfied with this state of affairs and with the dual band of consequences that seem set to be unleashed from Malta with apparent, EU Commission (not Parliament) blessing.
I, am not.
No.
Not in my name.
I urge the Nationalist Party to obtain an answer to these several questions from Joaquin Almunia for me and others who may think in this same vein.
This as a conclusion was altogether too rushed and hurried. If Commission has decided that Citizenship is a national competence, then any decision to change the very definition, nature and dignity of it should have required a mandate stipulated in the Labour election “manifest.” The fact that there was none, gives no legitimacy to any request to change the nature of it. This point could not have been taken into consideration.
Meanwhile, what we are confronted with, once again, is another opaque “outcome” for the Labour Party in Government. Why was it not clear about the agreement reached?
As though to gain support from the social partners and submission from the Opposition, through the use of coercive strategy, before the terms are clarified.
Another PR exercise to assist it towards its, and Henleys, objectives.
It is not only Henley and Partners which had a vested commercial interest in seeing Muscat in power.
Let us not forget that something similar occurred with the Gasol, the Anglo-Nigerian company forming part of the consortium that will be selling electricity to our country for the next two decades.
This is what the Times reported last November:
“The multimillion-euro energy deal between the Government and Electrogas depended on Labour’s victory at the polls last March, according to Gasol’s CEO.
Gasol, which says it wants to be the leading supplier of gas for power generation and industrial applications in West Africa, is leading the consortium chosen by Enemalta for the construction of a new gas-fired power station in Malta.”
“In an interview with the London-based International Oil Daily, Alex Buxton said: “The success of the project relied on the recent landslide victory of the Labour Party, which came to power in March.””
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20131119/local/Energy-deal-depended-on-Labour-election-win-.495320#.UvKhRNJDtlc
The Labour Party has finally found a Leader who can put Lorry Sant to shame when it comes to sleaze.
Lorry Sant was uneducated. What’s Muscat’s excuse?
I think all these prophets of doom need to buck up and look positive. The Labour Party can only remain in power as long as we vote for it.
Look at Ukraine, look at the Arab spring for God’s sake! We need to be positive. For me Joseph Muscat is living up to my expectations of him before March 2013. I always considered him an immature, unprofessional and over ambitious person without the capability to govern. We need to consider the scenario now that if Greece and Portugal, not to mention other EU member states, decide to buck up their finances by selling EU passports too.
Koolaid thinking.
Lots of people voted for Muscat, just as they voted for Mifsud Bonnici even though they could see the difference.
We now have a ‘Kim Joey un’ here. Don’t ‘misunderestimate’ him. (Appologies to Bush) Not as much hair as his North Korean and Chinese buddies, but just as sinister.
All that Henley & Partners needs to pay to the MLP is 2% of their expected income of €200 million. It is a pittance for Henley.