Coming up soon: the American and Chinese billionaires to whom Identity Malta sold Maltese citizenship and put on the electoral roll

I know that many of you will have used a calculator this morning to work out 2% of €320 million and said “Jesus wept” (or whatever). Somebody commented yesterday that I’m beginning to think like an accountant. Well, no, actually – I’m working at thinking like a crook. When you do that, the scales fall from your eyes and the layers begin to peel off.

And these are particularly crooked crooks, with no parameters. So it’s at the point where you find yourself thinking, “No, come on, that’s impossible…they would never have done that” that you know you’re close to getting at the truth.

Right now I’m working on stories of how an American billionaire (I wonder whether the US embassy knows about this) and a Chinese billionaire (ditto the Chinese government) have fetched up on Malta’s electoral roll, totally incongruously, as new Maltese citizens.