To own an island is a privilege enjoyed by, among others, Richard Branson, the Onassis and Borromeo clans, and George from the Famous Five. The first three also own tracts of mainland that are much larger and more productive than their offshore holdings. And yet, it is their islands that figure in our dreams.

There is something intriguing about private islands. They are places that geography has dressed in the borrowed robes of sovereignty. To own an island is to play the sovereign prince, even if today all private islands are under the jurisdiction of national governments.

It follows that to buy one is a kind of mock conquest. At a time when nationalism is the prevailing political order, it is scarcely possible to grab a sovereign territory without seriously upsetting someone. The next best thing is to acquire a place that appears to have a natural border with a sovereign territory, and then to go on to imagine that armies only travel overland.

If buying an island is an eccentricity made possible by stacks of cash, selling one (or many) tends to be the result of the opposite condition. It is often a means by which countries that need it can raise the money. Greece and Croatia are among the ones that have been known to do it.

It would, at face value, be unthinkable for Malta to do the same. Selling Gozo would be a tad tricky, and I can’t imagine our government cashing in on Comino or St Paul’s Island any time soon – though both were leased by emphyteusis to private citizens well into the 20th century.

The reasons are that, unlike Greece and Croatia, we don’t have that many islands to spare, and that in any case our whole territory is made up of islands. To sell one or two would be rather like a partition or a division of the national territory. That, and I’m not sure Comino’s three residents would particularly enjoy becoming mock vassals of a pretend prince.

Still, there’s hope yet. Consider three stories that recently made it to the headlines of the Times of Malta. In the first, the Ahlstroms, a Swedish couple who had sold their businesses and assets back home and moved to “peaceful and tranquil” Gozo, decided it was a bad idea after all. The reason was some problem they had with the law courts, which made up their minds that this was a “Third World country” that was unworthy of their time and money.

When Malta fails to live up to the product description, the deal will likely fall through

What caught my eye was the way the matter was phrased by the reporter. Here were wealthy people who had bought a share, as it were, in (or of) Malta. Two “luxury apartments”, one at Chambray and another at Kempinski, provided tangible evidence of the purchase.

Except they discovered the deal had been a bad one. As Mr Ahlstrom put it, “this is not the place to be. Apart from a justice system, which puts Third World countries to shame, I realised that the society in general is so rotten … Farewell Malta”.

The drift is that when Malta fails to live up to the product description, the deal will likely fall through. The Ahlstroms’ was not a story about judicial practice in Gozo, but rather one about a transaction gone wrong. Malta missed out on the sale of two luxury apartments, and presumably on the spending power of two wealthy expats. For their part, the Ahlstroms were robbed of their consumer rights: what they had been sold as a first-class product turned out to be third rate.

The second case is that of Michelle Sullivan, an Australian expat who also decided that the product was not what it said on the tin. In her case the problem was construction noise and dust in Swieqi, where she lived. Before she shook the proverbial and literal dust off her feet, Ms Sullivan told the Times of Malta that she had had enough of this country, that she was selling up, and that Malta was a Third World country.

The third case takes us to Buġibba, where two weeks ago a bunch of young men had an argument on the square that got a bit out of hand. The Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association had this to say about the evils of street fighting: it risked spoiling Malta’s “absolutely safe destination status”, and therefore the country’s value on the tourist market.

I could go on listing examples. There is, however, a general point to be made. Increasingly I think, there is a tendency to think of Malta as the product in a transaction that features the Maltese as the sellers and foreigners as the buyers. The ongoing sale is usually masked using words like investment, potential, quality destination, and such.

Two kinds of transaction matter more than others. The first involves people like the Ahlstroms and Ms Sullivan, who have the means to buy what has become our main export: luxury real estate, whatever that means. In the second, the buyers are tourists who also in a way consume real estate, preferably of the multi-starred variety.

I’d say these two types of sale have ritual status. They are what drives the grand narrative of making Malta great by selling top-quality chunks of it to men and women who come from afar bearing great gifts.

Anything that leavens the transaction – the friendliness of the Maltese, the blueness of the sea, tax benefits, and so on – is sacred. Anything that threatens to spoil it – bumbling law courts in Gozo, noisy cranes, street brawls, and so on – makes the news as a dent in the product.

In bits and chunks maybe, but it would appear that selling off an island nation is doable after all.

mafalzon@hotmail.com