Yes, apparently you CAN put a price on Maltese citizenship: a mere €25,000
Everybody seems to have fixed on the figure of €650,000. Or at least, everyone I have spoken to has done so, and so is everything I have read in the newspapers pivoted on that figure.
But the actual passport price-tag is €25,000. That €650,000 figure functions as ‘key money’, with everyone else other than The Applicant paying €25,000 for their passports.
Arguably, if the €650,000 is a door-opener for the entire family, then The Applicant’s passport is actually free, with the others paying €25,000 each.
The law is also written to allow the minister discretion in polygamous situations. A man with four wives and 20 children – bear in mind where the target market is, or part of it – can buy them a Maltese passport each for €600,000 in all. Yes, that’s 24 Maltese passports at a grand total of €600,000. There are some maisonettes that cost less than that.
This is the subject of my column in The Malta Independent tomorrow, which you can read on-line.
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I thought that of the €650,000 initially invested in Malta, only €10,000 is a non-refundable deposit. The rest can be withdrawn at a later stage and if topped up with €10,000 can then be passed on to the next person in the queue for an EU passport.
Hence the real cost of an EU passport is only €10,000.
If the government intends to net €35m from this exercise, then it is planning to issue about 3,500 new passports.
[Daphne – I’ve given that a lot of thought, but can’t really work out what they mean by ‘deposit’. I suppose what they mean is that the rest of the money can only be taken back if one gives up Maltese citizenship. The likelihood of that happening is remote, so I conclude that they’re banking all the money staying here because nobody will want to return their passport once they’ve got it. Unless they really need the money. But even that’s confusing: when an entire family have bought citizenship on the back of a single investment of 650,000 euros, do they ALL have to give up citizenship to take the money back, or just ‘the applicant’?]
Hang on a minute. The key word is “investment”. If you invest in something, the money’s still yours. I mean it doesn’t belong to the government of Malta to use in its annual budget.
Let’s say I’m a billionaire oil magnate from Azerbaijan, like that fat chap getting fed caviar by a couple of supermodels in a James Bond film whose name I forget. I want a Maltese passport. So I open a caper-picking establishment in Malta, employing 50 barely-literate school-leavers, at a cost of 650,000 Euros. Because the place is, say, air-conditioned and has a gym for employees. That’s my fee sorted.
I get a Maltese passport. Joseph Muscat only gets the capital gains tax he can levy on my earnings, right? Plus the trifling fee of 10,000 Euros. So who’s doing the “math” here?
No one.
What if the said investment fails after the passport was issued? The billionaire will sell the assets thus recouping part of the investment and he would have bought a passport for 10k + some money lost in the said investment. Is the scenario we’ll be looking at?
Let’s have a parliamentary question shall we?
Citizenship in lieu, referring to employment policy during the golden years may provide the answers.
What happens to pets? Those need a passport in the EU. .
Good point Jozef. What will be the passport price tag for a monkey, or a dog or a cat, or a horse, or….?
Reminds me of Alfred Sant on TV explaining how a confectionery will collect different CET rates for sweets made from local or from imported flour, or for pencils used in schools or offices.
It sounds to me like a deposit that is paid while the application for citizenship is being processed and that is not refundable if citizenship is denied in the end or if the applicant backs out.
I think you’re right.
The due diligence fees and bank charges fees are not refundable.
The Non-Refundable Payment is not refundable; in the event of an Application having been denied, the Non-Refundable Payment is to be disbursed by the Concessionaire within five days to Identity Malta to cover its own costs relating to the denied Application.
The Contribution balance, once received in Malta, is not refundable after the letter of approval in principle has been issued.
Seems to me that the 10,000 euros deposit is non refundable even if the application for citizenship is turned down under one of the many safeguards in the legislation – criminal background check, threat to security of company, undesirable applicant period. The rest gets paid back to the applicant. Nothing unreasonable there.
From what I can make out, the EUR 10,000 non-refundable payment refers to that portion of the contribution (to the “National Development Fund”) paid up front by the main applicant at the time of submission of the application.
At the same time the applicant undertakes to make the entire contribution, i.e. EUR 10,000 + remaining EUR 640,000, and to remit the remaining EUR 640,000 when called to do so by the Concessionaire.
When the letter of approval in principle has been issued, the Concessionaire shall instruct the Main Applicant to remit the remaining EUR 640,000 within twenty days from such instruction.
According to Regulation 8 (3), the Contribution balance, once received in Malta, is not refundable after the
letter of approval in principle has been issued.
This means that, once paid up, all of the EUR 650,000, be it the deposit or the balance, is non-refundable. The difference between them is the actual timing of the remittance.
One final word, I notice that there is no requirement for the applicant to make an investment by way of a business undertaking employing say X number of people. This hints that the target may only be after the freedom to carry on with their business activities elsewhere in the EU.
Polygamy pays taghna lkoll.
Next, the right to relegate one’s wife to the open cabin of a pick-up followed by the right to bear arms.
I just can’t imagine the expression on the radical chic’s faces.
They say they will conduct due diligence checks on those who try to buy Maltese citizenship.
Right.
If it’s as good as the due diligence they carried out on their consultant Shiv Nair, it’s going to be a free for all.
U ajma, they weren’t honest enough to explain their own ministers’ declarations, let laone verify the provenance of funds by prospective applicants.
Daphne is it true that in USA one can pay $500,000 invest and get citizenship?
[Daphne – Buy an American passport for half a million dollars? Of course not. You can’t buy one at all. If American passports were selling for half a million dollars, a large chunk of the world’s population would have bought one already. Getting a green card is difficult enough. Scratch that, even getting into the country is a problem.]
You seem to be confusing residency with citizenship, Max.
What they have in the US is the EB-5 investment VISA. To be eligible you need to invest $500,000 into one of a large selection of investment opportunities which are vetted by the government.
This will grant you and your family permanent residency status. After living there for five years, assuming good conduct, your family can then apply for citizenship.
I think the whole thing is a mess.
It’s not the norm, acceptable or even something any self-respecting country would consider.
I can already see the twisted logic, Xarabank style, selling passports is ‘normal’, no it isn’t.
Letta granted citizenship to both dead and survivors of last week’s tragedy.
He did it in the latter’s case to stop criminal proceedings undertaken by magistrates given the draconian laws. The message is clear, the notorious Bossi-Fini act is about to be removed.
Dear Joseph manages to come up with a comprehensive price list the same week.
A bit like when he proposed we divert travellers from Egypt.
One suspects his timing is awry sometimes, fact is when his actions are this ludicrous, anytime is wrong.
You need to invest 500k in a business and get a green card. Citizenship comes after years
Wrong, Max – you can apply for an investor’s visa known as an E-2 whereby person from treaty countries must commit to invest a substantial undefined amount in which case you get a 5 year visa and derivative visas for dependents.
The other way to buy in to the U.S. is to get an EB-5 immigrant investor visa which commits applicant to investing $1 million and creating a certain amount of jobs in certain deprived areas. After 5 years permanent residency one gets to apply for U.S. citizenship.
http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=facb83453d4a3210VgnVCM100000b92ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=facb83453d4a3210VgnVCM100000b92ca60aRCRD
…which can be rejected…
We need not worry, because next year the government plans to raise thirty million euros from this scheme and strong due diligence will put in place, you know, same as that put in the place for selected government consultants. Pull the other one, Joey.
So Malta joins Austria, St Kitts and Nevis and Dominica in selling citizenship. Bet we’ll get quite a few Chinese tycoons wanting to tap into the EU’s resources using Malta as a stepping stone. Nice one Joey. Unbelievable and sad. You can stick the 30m eur up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Oh, and by the way, thumbs up for breaking the news before other media sources.
Even if it were one cent. The point is that citizenship is extra commercium.
The point is the hypocrisy. Are we going to have a barge offshore to check if the immigrants have a million dollars and if they have you let them in and if they don’t you push them back as you cry wolf with the world and tell the EU to smell the coffee?
And who is going to check the discretion? We all know that where there is discretion it is going to be challenged. Can Malta afford all the cases that will be filed at the European Court of Human Rights? This whole idea is neo-Nazism.
[Daphne – Well, isn’t that what they are. And Mallia in particular strikes me as a man whose secret fantasy is to have somebody march all over him in jackboots, and not necessarily a woman, either. You can spot his uniform-and-boots fetish a mile off, or at least, I can.]
Kif kien jghid il-Malti qabel tilef kull rispett u dinjita’ tieghu innifsu:
IL-QAHBA MILLI JKOLLHA TTIK.
Comic relief http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20131009/local/citizenship-up-for-grabs-on-maltapark.489645#.UlWrOMsaySM
Wives: cheaper by the dozen (for passports at least)
There is an investment programme for permanent residence in the US. Evenutally there can be a right to citizenship.http://www.eb5immigration.com/.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/28/17724530-money-cant-buy-love-but-it-can-open-the-door-to-us-citizenship?lite
[Daphne – Nobody turns away investors, David. Whether they will give them citizenship is another matter. Mohammed Al Fayed’s battle with Britain for a British passport is legendary. And this even when he owned London’s most iconic department store and invested many hundreds of millions in the country. There’s a lot of confusion, I’ve noticed, between ‘resident’ and ‘citizen’. Malta is full of non-Maltese residents. They are not Maltese citizens. Investors can become residents, but not citizens. Citizenship may then be at the discretion of the country concerned, after many years, and it is not something that is bought.]
Non returnable deposit would likely be the application fee. Therefore non returnable if not accepted. This is sometimes requested to view some multi million properties, for example.
He’s not only selling passports. He’s buying votes.