Identity Malta employees arrested after a raid at the government’s agency Valletta head office are back at work as the police did not find any evidence of wrongdoing, the Times of Malta is informed. They were first arrested in September during an investigation into what the government had described as a racket in the granting of residence permits which had been going on "for years”.
The three workers had been suspended from work on full pay and put on police bail for three months, however, no charges were ever brought against them and the police bail has now been lifted.
“The three government employees were arrested several times since September and held for 48 hours at the police depot on every occasion. They always insisted they had done nothing wrong and we had no evidence that would sustain an arraignment,” a senior police officer told this newspaper.
During the raid when the first arrests were made, the police seized a number of documents, mobile phones and computers.
The three employees joined Identity Malta the past two years and previously worked in the private sector. Identity Malta was among the first agencies set up by the Labour Party after being returned to power in March 2013.
The “racket” came to the fore after former Labour treasurer Joe Sammut was taken to court last August and accused of registering hundreds of fictitious companies to obtain residence permits for Libyan citizens. A number of low-ranking employees at Identity Malta had also been arraigned and admitted helping Mr Sammut.
Figures show that, in 2014, the number of residence permits issued soared to 14,000, more than double the amount in 2013. It also resulted later that approximately 3,500 Libyan citizens were given residence permits in 2014, eight times more than in 2011, during the bloody Libyan revolution.
The Nationalist Opposition immediately called for an independent inquiry to establish what was going on. Accusing the government of institutional corruption involving officials at Identity Malta, it called for the resignation of former Labour candidate Joe Vella Bonnici, who heads the agency.
The Prime Minister rejected the accusations and defended Mr Vella Bonnici saying he had been instrumental in uncovering the racket at the agency. Joseph Muscat said he would have no problem calling an independent inquiry when police investigations were over. Asked yesterday whether the Prime Minister still intended to order an independent inquiry and whether it was now the right time to do so, the Office of the Prime Minister had not replied by the time of writing.
Identity Malta has introduced more stringent rules, which have resulted in substantially fewer residence permits being issued.