The inevitable has happened: the identity cards system is packing in

This is just so typical of the Labour Party’s ‘anyone can do anything’ approach and ‘no special skills are required’. U ejja mhux xorta. Read this shocking story in The Malta Independent today.

They create an outfit called Identity Malta, to hold all personal identity and status data, including passports and identity card records and visas. They give it barely any thought for how it will work, concentrating only on how they can make money from it through selling ‘golden visas’, issuing visas to foreign cronies, and selling citizenship.

Then the system packs in, because it’s not designed to cope with corruption, selling residence visas and selling citizenship. People who have no birth certificate are being registered. People who have bought citizenship are registered twice or three times. Yes, there are people with two and even three different identity card numbers, and nobody quite knows the extent of the problem.

Joe Vella Bonnici, the former Labour Party candidate who the government chose to head this Identity Malta outfit, has made the most incredible hash of things, casting out trained public servants and loading the shop with Labour cronies, including Family Minister Michael Farrugia’s girlfriend in a directorship position, and various junior party activists who can barely write.

He has made Identity Malta oblique to the press and the public, refusing to take media questions or keep the public informed. To ask him a couple of questions about where the money is going from the sale of citizenship, I actually had to confront him on a street corner in Valletta, butting in to a conversation he was having with a gentleman from the Indian subcontinent, who he assured me was a “consultant” and not one of the many people from that part of the world who are now Maltese citizens.

It’s a mess, a frightening mess. We are just a few months away from the general election and there are people who have two or three votes each. But that’s just a part of it. The real worry is that this is just the tiniest visible part of the chaos, and God alone knows, at this stage, what is unfolding beneath the service in every sector.

Former Labour Party candidate Joe Vella Bonnici, chief of Identity Malta and responsible for identity cards. Now he’s panicking about the mess.