Labour is at it again, selling Malta by the pound. And, like that sneaky car salesman out to swindle a fast buck today and to hell with tomorrow, Labour’s rhetorical spin is deceptive and offensive to intelligence.
Parliamentary Secretary José Herrera made a big deal last week when he announced a revamped residency and visa programme with the aim of “attracting international investors” to the island. The scheme will do nothing of the sort.
It is just a cheaper version of the passport racket and its main beneficiaries are probably Libyans who cannot go anymore to the likes of Joe Sammut to get a residence permit.
Anyone willing to come to live in polluted and traffic-congested Malta now has to buy property worth at least €320,000, or opt for a cheaper option in the south of Malta or Gozo, where the minimum limit is €270,000. Alternatively, they can choose to rent property in Malta for a yearly minimum of €12,000 or rent property in southern Malta or Gozo for a minimum of €10,000 a year. For Herrera that constitutes foreign investment.
But just in case we run away with the idea that he was selling residency cheaply, Herrera said that these new residents shall also be required to make a staggered acquisition of €250,000 in interest-free government bonds. That’s bad news for the many people who like to securely invest in these bonds. The government will now be borrowing, free of charge, from Libyans, and leave it to future governments to refund their loans. This too Herrera thinks is investment.
For Herrera all this is great news because it “represents a new level of investment and further economic growth”.
The money, he tells us, will be “invested in the creation of more jobs, the training of workers, embellishment projects, the engagement of more nurses and investment in education”. Is this man serious?
So far, the only investment the government has made is in giving public appointments to its cronies and paying off scandalous sums to the likes of Café Premier and Marco Gaffarena. This country is being whored out for the government to finance its indulgences. This is not investment.
Herrera’s revamped residence scheme will not mean more nurses inside our overcrowded hospital, better-trained Maltese workers to compete with the many foreigners who come to work here, or better schools that would stop the endless flow of unqualified school leavers that invariably end up voting Labour.
This is colonialism in a new coat, not unlike the 1960s schemes that aimed to attract retired, well-off Britons to come to live here to employ Maltese wives as maids and their husbands as handymen.
The only difference is that, this time round, the landlords will probably be Libyans.
• The Nationalist Party got its fingers burned with Herrera’s sale of residence scheme and we hope it has learnt its lesson - to never trust Labour.
Maybe it needs to be spelt out: you do not cooperate with a sleazy government that operates in secrecy and backroom deals. You do not cooperate with a government that treats its people like imbeciles, that keeps all international deals secret, that insults us every day with shameless political patronage.
No, you do not cooperate with a degenerate administration unless it changesits ways.
When you compromise and cooperate, you are betraying people who have hope in the only alternative available, the PN.
Clearly, it is not just the government that needs to put its house in order. The Nationalist Party should live up to its name and be truly nationalist
Deputy leader Mario de Marco contributed to the drawing of the sale of residences. Herrera made a point of mentioning de Marco’s contribution, in a way echoing Labour’s cooperative stance when the PN in government was legislating on the immensely successful financial services sector. There is, however, a fundamental difference today - the government has changed and Labour has much lower standards of what constitutes decency. This scheme is indecent.
The PN reacted saying the residence scheme did not address the issue of institutionalised corruption and that it made no sense for the government to announce a new visas and permits scheme when the institutions are “still being eroded by the same people who allowed Joe Sammut to do whatever he liked”.
All valid points, no doubt, but the PN’s position had been compromised by cooperating with a government that runs the country like it’s a self-service store where everything is for sale, and onthe cheap.
Herrera had no answers to give when questioned on the Sammut scheme. He said it did not fall under his responsibility, despite the fact that he is a Cabinet member. He just meandered around the subject, meaning that the residence scheme he launched has ignored the alleged Sammut scandal altogether.
The government shot back, accusing the PN of internal division, in a partisan statement of the worst sort issued through the taxpayer-funded Department of Information: so much for cross-party cooperation on financial services. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat twisted the knife on Sunday, mocking the Nationalists over their stand.
The gloves were off the moment the government had had its way and avoided a controversy over its latest scam. The PN weakly replied that it never said it was against the scheme. In fact, it should have been.
• With the country still reeling from the news that there may be hundreds of Libyans with fraudulent residences permits on the island, this is not the time to launch new residence schemes. There are people out there worried by the many Libyans at Little Tripoli, as Tignè Point has come to be called.
The priority now should be to weed out whoever else was involved in the alleged Sammut racket and put in the necessary safeguards to avoid this happening again. The system of so-called due diligence has failed so miserably that it could be a national security risk.
The PN should never have agreed to cooperate over the scheme, more so after the Prime Minister snubbed its call to immediately convene the Security Committee to discuss the hundreds of illegitimate visas issued to Libyans. The committee will be convened on September 10 because, according to the government, that is the earliest date that all members can attend. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister slipped out of the country for a holiday.
People expect the PN to come across as a serious, no-nonsense Opposition, an alternative to this degenerate government that sells the country’s assets, its heritage sites, its virgin land, its hospitals, its passports and its real estate, because it knows no other way of keeping the economy going.
The residence scheme has exposed the PN as gullible, or complicit, with this government. Clearly, it is not just the government that needs to put its house in order. The Nationalist Party should live up to its name and be truly nationalist.
Compromise does not work with Labour because Labour is a bully and sees it as a weakness. The PN knows exactly what Labour thinks of it.
It humours it in Parliament, it wipes the floor with it during question time by avoiding answering the most pertinent of questions and it denigrates it repeatedly by pointing to the 36,000-plus electoral victory.
That 36,000 advantage is fickle because the electorate is fickle and that is immensely disheartening. Still, there is hope because this country is also immensely nationalist and proud.
People don’t like it that our passports are being peddled, that resident permits are sold and that our land is being given away to foreign investors for a pittance.
The Nationalist Party has a history to be proud of, and so does this country. It just needs a bit more courage to speak up against the recolonisation of Malta by people with fat wallets, and without compromise.