Identity Malta has issued 14,000 residence permits since 2013

Sandro Chetcuti, president of the Malta Developers Association: the construction industry is now being driven by the buy-to-let market, a bubble that will burst if the 14,000 residence permits issued since 2013 are withdrawn in any great part.

Joe Vella Bonnici, chief of Identity Malta: a visa racket under his watch

Identity Malta, which was set up by the incoming Labour government – originally under the stewardship of Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia – has issued FOURTEEN THOUSAND residence permits so far.

In other words, 14,000 non-EU citizens have come to live in Malta in the last two years. Of these, several hundred are Libyan citizens for whom former Labour Party treasurer Joe Sammut incorporated and registered shell companies.

It’s more than clear that there’s a full-on racket going on, but the implications are much wider than that. Those 14,000 people will all have needed somewhere to live. Allowing, of course, for the fact that many of them will be couples or families who will be living under the same roof, this corruption racket is one of the factors that is driving the boom in demand for rental property.

And that in turn is driving the boom in demand from Maltese citizens for flats to buy to rent. And that – you’ve got it – is driving people like Sandro Chetcuti and the Malta Developers Association to build more and more flats, knock down more and more houses, and create more and more pressure on space in popular places like Sliema and St Julian’s.

The ‘buy to let’ market is also driving the demand for tower-blocks, with the authorities considering several applications to build them.

And the construction lobby is putting the government under increased pressure to release more ODZ land to development.

The result is environmental mayhem and plummeting aesthetics. But there is a much worse result: people who actually live in Malta and want to buy their first home can’t find anything to buy. Prices are being driven sky-high and flats are being snapped up for the buy-to-let market.

The government’s investigation into the granting of residence permits will result in nothing. For a start, it is the government itself which is granting them. There is no way on earth that 14,000 residence permits could have been issued in two years without this being official government policy. This is not a couple of corrupt underlings we are talking about here. This is deliberate, and authorised.

And beyond that, the pressure on the government not to withdraw the permits is now enormous. If thousands of residence permits are withdraw simultaneously, the rental market will collapse.

The buy-to-let market will collapse. And in the construction industry, chaos will ensue. The banks will begin foreclosing and an economic bubble built entirely on the issuing of residence permits will burst.