Why would Codruta Mallia have wanted to become a Maltese citizen?

Manuel and Codruta Mallia

Codruta Mallia was a Romanian citizen, a citizen of the European Union, and married to a Maltese citizen when she applied to become a Maltese citizen herself.

While we journalists are preoccupied with the question of corruption and abuse in the way her citizenship application was whizzed through the system successfully while her husband was the Citizenship Minister – documents published today show that she applied shortly after her husband become the responsible minister and acquired it nine months later – we are not considering an equally important question.

Why would Codruta Mallia have needed to become a Maltese citizen? There is no obvious way in which her status under the law in Malta could have been affected by her not becoming one, so we need to be looking at the non-obvious ways she and her husband stood to gain by this, even if it’s just by a few hundred euros here and there, given that these are people who used to send their household skivvy to the public fountain for water to wash their floors with.