UPDATED/Citizenship Minister Manuel Mallia granted Maltese citizenship to his new wife last year

Codruta Cristian married Manuel Mallia in July 2012. She has since become a Maltese citizen. The law stipulates that four and a half years must elapse from the marriage date before an application for citizenship may be made. Mallia was the minister responsible for citizenship.

In my enquiries following a newspaper report that Elena Codruta Cristian had been billed by the health department for treatment at the state hospital in 2008, which she hasn’t yet paid – I discovered that she only married Manuel Mallia in July 2012, four years after their children were born and after Mallia had obtained a divorce under the new legislation – I discovered a far more interesting piece of information.

Her identity card, which when I last checked in connection with another story last year was 0044936A (resident alien) Elena Codruta Cristian is now 0170814L (Maltese citizen) Elena Codruta Mallia.

The change in surname was obviously possible because of her marriage to Manuel Mallia. But how in heaven’s name did she obtain Maltese citizenship so soon after her marriage? They were married in July 2012 and the law is quite specific in that a non-Maltese spouse is only allowed to apply for Maltese citizenship after four and a half years of marriage to a Maltese citizen.

Yet Codruta Cristian/Mallia became a Maltese citizen last year. This is denoted by the 14L at the end of the number. The ’14’ is the year of birth (for those born Maltese citizens) or the year of acquisition of Maltese citizenship. The ‘L’ began to replace the ‘M’ on identity cards in 2000 as the letter which denotes citizenship.

Last year, when she acquired Maltese citizenship, her husband was responsible for citizenship as Home Affairs Minister.

She can’t have applied for Maltese citizenship under the law which allows such application after four and a half years of marriage, because they’d only been married for two years, if that, when she became a citizen.

The law on naturalization allows people who have lived in Malta for more than five years to apply for citizenship, but in reality this is rarely granted except to those who have lived in Malta for a great many years, and even then the likelihood is that you will be refused.

It is not at all likely that Manuel Mallia spent 650,000 euros on buying Maltese citizenship for his new wife. So we can conclude that he took the cheaper, abusive option of using his ministerial discretion (permitted in certain restricted cases under the law) to make his own wife a Maltese citizen.

I think some questions need to be put to his Home Affairs successor in parliament. Then, if the usual ‘we are still gathering the information’ answer comes through, the question can be put directly to Emanuel Mallia MP.