Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has refused to give Parliament information about the people who have bought their Maltese passport under the government’s controversial citizenship scheme.

Dr Muscat last week rejected a request by PN MP Karol Aquilina to identify the people on a Government Gazette list of hundreds of people who were given Maltese citizenship in 2015.

The list, published in August 2016, does not draw any distinction between those who paid €1 million to gain EU access and those granted citizenship through naturalisation.

Dr Muscat told Parliament that the law regulating the scheme did not allow for such distinctions to be made.

The coveted Maltese passport.

Doing so could result in discrimination and violate the principle of equality for all citizens, Dr Muscat said.

The scheme as originally envisioned by concessionaries Henley & Partners, in 2013, would not even have allowed for the publication of these names in the Government Gazette.

In a separate question asking for the age and sex of passport buyers, Dr Muscat said such information would not be given, to protect people’s data and privacy.

Fierce resistance by the Opposition and European Commission eventually led to the government backing down and agreeing to publish a list of naturalised citizens mixed with those who had bought their passports. The European Commission also insisted that passport buyers establish “genuine links” with the island.

A 2016 exercise by this paper found that a number of millionaires who had applied for Maltese citizenship appeared to be ‘living’ in modest flats in areas like Birżebbuġa, Mellieħa, St Paul’s Bay and Mġarr.

Portuguese Socialist MEP Ana Gomes said on Friday Dr Muscat had failed to give a delegation probing the rule of law in Malta a promised list of passport buyers.

It allows people to launder large sums of money while gaining access to the EU

The government has also maintained its silence about why it has yet to publish in the Government Gazette the list of people given Maltese citizenship in 2016. This list is usually published every August. The government is legally obliged to publish it once a year.

In a report by Transparency International Russia, the anti-corruption NGO charted how two Russian politicians bought Maltese citizenship, seemingly in defiance of Russian laws.

Russian law prohibits politicians from holding dual citizenship, according to the report, co-authored by civil society activist and blogger Manuel Delia.

The organisation questions how Aleksey Borisovich Mazurov, a deputy in Moscow’s regional Parliament, managed to buy citizenship and take out a mortgage on a €1.5 million property that appeared to go beyond his dec-lared income.

Transparency International Russia said the abuses it had identified clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of the Maltese citizenship scheme.

It said the lack of transparency and the lack of verification by the EU created additional opportunities for “corrupt officials” who wanted to avoid justice.

Such a scheme was also attractive since it allowed people to launder large sums of money while simultaneously gaining access to all EU countries, Transparency International said.

Earlier this year, assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia reported that Henley & Partners chairman Christian Kalin had conspired with the Prime Minister and his chief of staff, Keith Schembri, to file crippling lawsuits against her in the UK.

Mr Schembri is facing a magisterial inquiry over a leaked report by the FIAU that concluded criminal investigations should take place to establish whether or not he took a €100,000 kickback on passport sales from his accountant, Brian Tonna.

Both men deny the claim, attes-ting that he €100,000 was a repayment for an interest-free loan Mr Schembri made to Mr Tonna in 2012.

The FIAU could find no trace of the original loan transaction, thus concluding that the case warranted further investigation.

The FIAU report was handed to the police but never investigated.

jacob.borg@timesofmalta.com