So, there we have it, our citizenship is reduced to a commodity, obtainable by any Tom, Dick or Harry, or whatever the equivalent names are in Arbenitakistan, provided that he has a few hundred thousand euros to spare and provided that Henley & Partners’ compliance department don’t obstruct its marketing department’s efforts.

In the financial services industry, on a Friday evening round a beer or two, compliance departments are referred to as the sales prevention department but I don’t imagine that the rigour with which financial services are regulated is going to be observed in the matter of flogging a few hundred passports to assorted shady characters.

I imagine, on the other hand, that umbrage will be taken because I am referring to the buyers of the passports that Henley & Partners will be getting for us as ‘shady characters’. Well, tough, the mere fact that the identity of these worthies is being kept a secret gives me the moral conviction that they have something to hide.

Joseph Muscat does not have the right to mess around with our citizenship

The Prime Minister and his sidekicks, in their defence of the deal they have made with Henley & Partners for the latter to sell what wasn’t the former’s to sell, have not managed to give one, single, remotely credible, iota of a reason why the names of the people who are going to become our fellow citizens are not going to be listed and laid open to public scrutiny.

This in itself leads to the conclusion that it is entirely reasonable to say that the Prime Minister himself has some reason or other to shroud the whole sordid transaction in veils of deepest black.

The Prime Minister is ever so eager to stand at the podium and lecture us on everything under the sun, outlining his road maps, delivering himself of his solutions for everything and even telling us the meaning of life.

So why don’t he stand up and answer one, simple, question? Here it is: why is he not going to tell us who has bought Maltese citizenship? Put differently: why is the transaction so shameful that a major selling point is anonymity?

A more complex question for him to answer would be: what gives him the impression that he has the right to sell Maltese citizenship? To answer that one, perhaps he can enlist the Attorney General to give him a ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ answer.

Whatever the Attorney General says, though, will not address the fundamental point, namely that he, Joseph Muscat, Prime Minister, does not have the right to mess around with our citizenship. His victory at the polls eight or so months ago, impressive as it was, does not give him this right because putting our passports on the supermarket shelf was not something that he had told us he would be doing.

One could ask, again, why this cunning plan was itself kept secret but only if one wanted to be naive.

The answer is as plain as the smirk on the Prime Minister’s face during the Leader of the Opposition’s demolition of his Budget: if Muscat had told his target audience, the switcher-volk, with their intellectual self-satisfaction at finding a reason to vote against the PN, that he planned to perpetrate this travesty, he wouldn’t have hoovered up their votes, pure and simple.

I wonder what Henley & Partners are telling Joe Bloggs or John Smith (I don’t know any Abtaksitani surnames) about the clear and present danger that their shiny new passports might be turned into pretty worthless bits of paper when the government changes.

Knowing the way this sort of outfit conducts itself, they’re, no doubt, spinning some sort of yarn about how the (present) Government has legal advice from the highest law officer of the land about how it would be unconstitutional for this to happen.

With all due respect to the Attorney General, his opinion on any legal issue is not the be-all-and-end-all of the argument. One only has to count the number of times the courts have told the authorities they’re wrong: from the Commissioner of Police’s “lowest of low courts” to the Constitutional Court of Appeal, the Government and its agents have been trounced time and time again.

To be fair, they’ve won a good amount of cases too but I’m merely making the point that the Attorney General’s opinion is only that, an opinion. Other legal minds, such as the one quoted in a blog elsewhere recently, have made it clear that there are other interpretations of the question and, loath as I am to go Latin on you, caveat emptor is a concept that Henley & Partner’s clients would be well advised to keep in mind.

The situation is this, in terms that you don’t need to be an eminent lawyer to grasp.

A simple Act of Parliament has turned our citizenship into a commercial commodity at the stroke of a pen. An equally simple Act of Parliament, or some other democratic means at the disposal of the citizenry, can reverse this at the stroke of another pen. Anyone affected by this would only have himself to thank because it has been made amply clear that the possibility of reversal is on the cards.

It is entirely possible that the European Court of Human Rights might take a different view to mine but it would surprise me not at all if the learned justices took a look at the reality, namely that a passport was bought in circumstances that were crystal-clearly fraught with uncertainty and told the plaintiff precisely where to get off.

A doff of the cap to Herman Grech and his team for The Lockerbie Bomber at St James, a short sharp tale about the venality of governments and the manner in which the truth finds itself contorted. It’s on this evening, so if you can, do go.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20