Jason Azzopardi claims Algerian whistleblower’s citizenship withdrawn over visa racket allegations

The government has withdrawn the citizenship of an Algerian-Maltese man because he revealed corrupt practices on the part of people close to the government, Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi said on Tuesday.

Speaking during parliamentary adjournment, Azzopardi said the “ultimate secular crime” that a state can commit is to deprive or revoke a person’s citizenship without a valid reason, adding that after Malta joined the EU, it’s citizens were also European citizens.  

He noted that he had obtained permission from the person in question beforehand.  

Azzopardi insisted that there had never been a case in Malta where an individual’s citizenship had been revoked for any reason other than them having entered into a marriage, deemed by the courts to have been a marriage of convenience.

“It is right, and this is how it should be, that when there is a court decision stating that a marriage was one of convenience, that citizenship is revoked,” he said, adding however that this was not what this case was about.

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He said that last week, an Algerian-Maltese man had been informed that his citizenship was being revoked “because 17 years ago, a court sentence had found that his marriage to Maltese woman had been annulled if consent is vitiated by a serious defect of discretion of judgment”.

Azzopardi explained that the Article 19 of the Marriage Act lists a number of grounds on which a marriage can be annulled, adding that this included vitiated consent.

However, he said, such cases did not mean that there was any fraud or that the marriage was one of convenience. In fact, he said the Act contained a “separate and distinct article” on marriages of convenience – Article 38.

Azzopardi said he was “shocked and disgusted” by what he alleged was retribution by the government’s for the man’s role in exposing the Algerian visas scandal.

The man, he said, had married in April 1995 and had received Maltese citizenship a few months later, in September.

“Algeria, it was in the news recently because the PN in 2015 asked the Auditor General to investigate the process through which the Algerian consulate was issuing visas,” Azzopardi said, adding that report in January had found bribes had been paid for the issuing of visas.

Azzopardi said that the Prime Minister and the then assistant police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar had both been informed about the alleged racked by the person who had now had his citizenship withdrawn.

The PN MP stressed that the man’s marriage had been annulled in 2002 but just last week, “the government, through identity Malta, wrote to him to say that his citizenship has been withdrawn”.

“There has never been a case where the annulment of a marriage resulted in a person’s citizenship being withdrawn 17 years later, and only a few months after an Auditor General report found that the allegations made by the same person, who owns a travel agency, and who had informed a number of people including the Prime Minister about corrupt practices, were in fact true,” Azzopardi said.  

In it’s report, which was published in January, the NAO said that it could not investigate allegations of bribery at Malta’s consulate in Algiers but said that the manner in which the office operated “facilitated the incidence of allegations”.

While the NAO said government’s response to the allegations made by an Algerian travel agent was “appropriate” because these were immediately referred to the police, it said the manner in which the consulate operated “somehow facilitated the incidence of allegations”.

READ MORE: Opposition demands NAO investigation on Algerian visa allegations