This government is truly smitten with the adage attributed to Mark Twain that a lie can travel half way round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
I bear no contentment declaring this. I state thus with a certain amount of sadness because, as any other citizen of this country, I legitimately expect the government, especially its head, to be a paragon of rectitude and moral high ground. Instead, this government, as witnessed over the last few days with regard to the sale-of-citizenship scheme, is a constant exercise in a labour of lies.
As this newspaper editorial put it so aptly the other day, the Prime Minister is wrong if he thinks he can fool people all the time.
First we had the second most influential minister in any Cabinet, the Finance Minister, brazenly declaring in early December in front of the European Parliament that a capping of a maximum of 50 citizenship applications per year under the Individual Investor Programme is in order.
Fast forward to the capping declared by the Prime Minister and entrenched in Legal Notice 450 published on Christmas Eve and the modern-day version of the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish unravels before you. The global capping is set at 1,800 main applicants.
Henley stated that they are aiming at about 300 successful applications annually. Each one of those is legally entitled, according to the same legal notice, to obtain the Maltese citizenship for his/her ‘dependants’, that is according to the same legal notice: spouse, both his and her parents and grandparents, and children.
Assuming the applicant has only one child, applying the definition of dependants in the legal notice, the total number shoots up to a little less than 20,000 persons. In the same formal declaration in front of MEPs, not an informal chat in one of our band clubs bottegin, the same finance minister confidently assured that investors wanting to acquire Maltese citizenship would need to have a better bonding with Malta, including the need to reside on the island.
The government, especially its head, should be a paragon of rectitude and moral high ground
This was and is the leitmotif of the Opposition’s stand in this saga: any foreign and genuine investor has to reside in Malta for a reasonable period of time, ideally five years, before being eligible for citizenship. However, both the Prime Minister and his legal notice refuse any obligation on any applicant to reside in Malta, not even for a day, prior to being granted citizenship.
During his press conference and subsequent government decla-rations, the Prime Minister stated that, among others, the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association was sitting around his table to show support. That same evening, the MHRA president denied this.
The Prime Minister also said the government consulted the stakeholders. Last week, we discovered that this was not so. The Malta Council for Economic and Social Development, which embraces the stakeholders, was never consulted.
Another deception was uncovered by The Sunday Times of Malta. While the Prime Minister had solemnly declared that financial service practitioners will enter into a direct relationship with the government (through Identity Malta) and will eventually even submit applications they receive from clients to that entity, from the form and covering letter now being issued by Henley, it results that, at best, authorised agents even before applying to Identity Malta must be vetted and cleared by Henley.
Moreover, while the Prime Minister assured us that Henley will no longer remain the entity exclusively handling this process, it is rather strange that that entity is being allowed to have access to all the sensitive information requested in their form about all practitioners in Malta wishing to work in this field.
As if this were not enough, while the Prime Minister had also declared that the contract with Henley will be revised, last Sunday, a government spokesman denied this. We need to know: why is the government being so accomodating, to say the least, with this private company?
It proves yet again that we are constantly dealing with a ‘government of the lie’. The Prime Minister needs to understand that he can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time. However, he cannot fool all the people all the time.
jason.azzopardi@gov.mt
Jason Azzopardi is a Nationalist MP.