Golden passports scheme discussed in parliament after EU court ruling

Hours after an EU court ruled against Malta's citizenship for investments scheme, Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri appeared in parliament with other government MPs and heaped praise on the programme.

Camilleri praised the scheme for supporting the country’s finances over the years, but especially during the pandemic. “We always defended Malta’s position. It’s a shame that the same can’t be said for others,” he said.

Camilleri said the decision is being studied in detail and the government has approached legal experts on the way forward.

“My appeal is that, in the future, and as the government analyses the sentence and considers the next step, we be united as a single country.”

After this, Nationalist MP Darren Carabott said he was disappointed to see the minister and the government playing the victim in this process.

“You’re using real people’s stories to twist this decision, which condemned you but was a win for Malta,” he said.

He insisted that the governmnet should accept the EU court’s ruling and start discussing changes to the citizenship law and golden passports scheme.

PN MP Adrian Delia said that he takes every opportunity to promote Malta abroad as an attractive place for investment. The problem with this scheme, he said, was that it failed to ensure that those buying citizenship had a genuine interest in the country.

Labour MP Alex Muscat, who had been the parliamentary secretary for citizenship, defended the scheme and said it benefitted lots of ordinary people, including families who sold or leased their properties to wealthy investors buying Maltese citizenship.

He also asked whether this decision will affect government projects financed by the state’s passport fund, such as health centres or the Ħal Far race track.

Nationalist MP Paula Mifsud Bonnici referred to ex-PM Joseph Muscat’s comments on the ruling. Muscat had described it as a political sentence, claiming that the ECJ ruled despite knowing that EU law was not on its side. Muscat was prime minister at the time of the programme's inception.

Mifsud Bonnici asked the government whether it agrees that this was a political ruling. “Are we going to attack European judges too?” she asked, referring to pressure on the judiciary throughout the Vitals inquiry.

She also said that, if the country’s wealth depended so much on the citizenship scheme, the government should come up with new ways to create wealth.

Towards the end of the short debate, Labour MP Edward Zammit Lewis referred to case law and said the European Commission’s argument on granting nationality was outdated. Nationalist MP Mark Anthony Sammut argued that money raised illegally is still unethical, while Labour MP Clayton Bartolo said the government never relied solely on the golden passports scheme for money.

Concluding the debate, Camilleri criticised the opposition for being inconsistent in its position on citizenship by investment. He said the real damage is not towards the government or cabinet but to ordinary people.