Manuel Mallia says wife applied for citizenship under Article 10 (“exceptional service to the Republic of Malta or to humanity”)

Codruta Mallia

The insufferably arrogant Manuel Mallia has issued a statement saying that he did not use his ministerial discretion to grant his wife Maltese citizenship, that she applied for citizenship not on the basis of her marriage to a Maltese citizen (Article 6 of the law) but under Article 10.

What he did not say is that Article 10 allows the granting of citizenship to those who have rendered “exceptional service to the Republic of Malta or to humanity, and their spouses”.

Mallia also said that he did not examine her application himself.

Who does he think he’s kidding – a gullible jury circa 1980?

My wife applied for citizenship by naturalization under article 10(1) of the Maltese Citizenship Act (Cap 188) and not on the strength of her marriage to me. Foreigners may submit an application under this article if they had been residing in Malta for 5 years prior to the date of application. My wife satisfied this condition.

So let’s see. An application for Maltese citizenship in the name of Codruta Mallia, resident of Valletta, wife of Emmanuel Mallia, resident of Ta’ Cenc, Gozo, lands on the desk of a civil servant in a department that falls within Minister Emmanuel Mallia’s portfolio, and the civil servant says to himself:

“I’ll follow the standard policy and refuse this like we refuse all other applications from almost everyone who applies under Article 10, because if we don’t stick to that policy, then we’ll be giving Maltese citizenship to every one of the many thousands of EU citizens and non-EU citizens and African immigrants and Libyan residents who have been here for five years or be accused of discrimination against them and preferential treatment for cabinet ministers’ wives.”

I don’t think so. Do you? The poor sod processed it at double speed because if an application for citizenship lands on your desk from your minister’s wife, then you don’t dare do anything else but that. Not under a Labour government, anyway.

Manuel Mallia was the minister responsible for citizenship for just over a year, and by some amazing coincidence it was precisely in that restricted period that his wife submitted her application.

Even if just for that alone, the application was in itself abusive and corrupt. A minister doesn’t have his wife submit a citizenship application for review by his own minions, when he is himself the responsible minister. Had her request for citizenship been a matter of urgency, with no choice but to submit it when he was minister himself, then he should have made a declaration to parliament.

But it was not a matter of urgency. And he hid it from parliament. Codruta Mallia was already the citizen of another EU member state, and beyond that she had married Mallia two years earlier, so her status in Malta was bullet-proof without Maltese citizenship.

People are furious at this abuse. They include all those non-Maltese who married Maltese citizens and who were told that they could not apply for citizenship under Article 10 but only under Article 6, which decrees that you have to be married to a Maltese citizen for five years before you can even apply for citizenship. A further year is then required for processing the application, before it is even considered.

Codruta Cristian married Manuel Mallia in 2012. She obtained Maltese citizenship in 2014.

The Nationalist Party has challenged this. I suggest it also confronts Manuel Mallia and asks him why he didn’t pay his girlfriend’s hospital bill of 3,000 euros, even though she used the free state healthcare facilities at Mater Dei Hospital, to which she was not entitled.

After all, the only reason I discovered that Codruta Cristian and Manuel Mallia married less than three years ago, and that she was granted Maltese citizenship last year when her husband was the Citizenship Minister and embroiled in discussions about selling citizenship to allcomers, is because I followed up on the court case in which the Department of Health is suing her for her unpaid hospital bill and has placed a garnishee order on her bank accounts.

Mrs Manuel Mallia is shamelessly trying to get out of paying that hospital bill by saying that it wasn’t her because look, there’s a mistake in her name. But it was her. It was when she gave birth to Manuel Mallia’s twins several years before they married.