A Dutch professor with close links to the cash-for-passports scheme concessionaire has been serving concurrently as a government consultant on the programme, but Identity Malta is insisting there is no conflict of interest.

Prof. Dimitry Kochenov, 38, was recently asked by the agency for his advice on the interpretation of the residency clause of the citizenship scheme. It states that in order to gain a Maltese passport, applicants must provide proof of having resided on the island for 12 months preceding the date of issuance of the certificate of naturalisation.

The Individual Investor Programme as it is called, is managed by Henley & Partners, which gets a commission for every successful application. It has emerged that from its launch in 2014 to June last year, the concessionaire has raked in more than €19 million from this programme.

Prof. Kochenov’s name cropped up in the fourth annual report recently issued by the Office of the Regulator of the IIP, headed by Carmel de Gabriele.

His contribution was related to an exercise whereby the regulator looked into concerns that IIP applicants were flouting the 12-month residency clause.

However, in his conclusion, he said that the concerns raised on physical presence had been dispelled, provided that the emphasis on establishing some form of “genuine link” with Malta as part of the IIP was retained.

This conclusion was partly based on the advice Prof. Kochenov had already given to Identity Malta. According to the academic, residency is a legal status and consequently does not carry the same meaning as ‘presence’.

Secondly, he advised that the conditions for obtaining the legal status of residency do not include the requirement of physical presence. Thirdly, Prof. Kochenov told Identity Malta in view of the fact that it was possible to hold a residence permit in more than one country, it was therefore a “physical impossibility” for an individual to be “omnipresent” in the countries in which they held a residence permit.

The report points out that apart from Prof. Kochenov’s legal advice there were sound arguments which prompted the regulator to dispel concerns that the IIP residence clause was not being observed.

However, the report makes no mention whatsoever of the close ties the academic has with Henley and Partners. A quick search on the firm’s website reveals that there is a dedicated section for him in the events section. Furthermore, Henley and Partners has also been cooperating with the academic in the production of the “Kochenov Quality of Nationality Index”.

Despite this close association, Identity Malta is refuting concerns of a conflict of interest while stressing the professor’s academic credentials, which were never questioned in the first place.

“The mere fact that he has collaborated with Henley and Partners, as he does with others, on a publication should not entail that he cannot advise a government in the field where he is widely considered as the leading expert,” said an agency spokesman.

In this case however, the government in question is the same that awarded the IIP concession to Henley & Partners.

On his part, the Dutch academic confirmed that he did consultancy work for the Maltese government as well as various EU institutions, including the Parliament and the Commission.

“It goes without saying that Identity Malta has the full knowledge of my activities: these are publicly listed. Indeed, this is precisely the reason behind all my consultancy engagements around the world,” he said.

As for the joint publication with Henley & Partners, he pointed out that he was not their employee. “In my view Identity Malta is absolutely right not to consider my co-publishing a famous index in the field of my core academic expertise with the absolute leader of the consulting world in the same field as a sign of bias, which it obviously is not, especially given that my contacts with Identity Malta predate the publication of the index,” he said.

As a matter of fact, a curriculum vitae on the website of Princeton University in New Jersey, US, says that Prof. Kochenov consulted for Malta on the 2014 citizenship law reform, which paved the way for the introduction of the Individual Investor Programme.