I spent much of yesterday monitoring the day’s European and world headlines (but mainly European, as this is where our bread is buttered) to get the slant of how the leading newspapers and agencies are reporting Malta’s Great Big Citizenship Sale.

Unsurprisingly, they all skipped right past the government’s propaganda about attracting high net worth individuals with talent to these islands – though they dutifully reported it in the main body of their reports – and went straight for the bare bones. Practically all of them headlined with one version or another of ‘Malta sells EU citizenship’. They have understood, as almost everyone else did immediately, that what Malta is selling is not Maltese passports but EU passports – and that, certainly, is what people will be buying.

All the reports specified that anyone who buys a Maltese passport will be able to live and work anywhere in the 28 EU member states, and will be able to move freely through Schengen and enter the United States of America without a visa. The headlines in the German newspapers were the most brutally to-the-point, announcing contemptuously that anyone can now become an EU citizen (read – and run all over Germany) thanks to Malta and a cash payment of €650,000. But the most mocking headline of all was in the French edition of Euronews, and this is completely unsurprising given that immigration is that country’s most contentious issue. In faithful translation, that headline reads: ‘FOR SALE: Maltese nationality and EU citizenship, never used, for €650,000.’  You could say it was rivalled by the headline in the newspaper of record in The Netherlands, De Volkskrant, which – entirely justifiably, given that we will be taking the money but creating a problem for other member states – insultingly used the slang favoured by used-car salesmen: ‘On sale for six big ones: Maltese citizenship’.

All the reports breezed over the mention of investment as though it is just some kind of irrelevant excuse (which it is) and picked on the fact that Malta is selling passports that will allow buyers the free run of their countries. And of course, when you think about it, the total lack of esprit de corps is just astounding. London, Paris, and Frankfurt deny permanent residence to Russians, Georgians, Azeris, Chinese, Libyans, Algerians, Egyptians and others except in certain circumstances and after much scrutiny. Then we go and sell them a passport and they go and set up shop and house in those very cities, defiantly, brandishing their newly-purchased Maltese citizenship.

By now, all but the thickest have understood that Malta is selling citizenship not because it wants people to come and live or work here, but precisely for the opposite reason: because it knows people won’t, because the government knows that they will take that passport and go and live in their first choice of European capital. Malta has just gone and made itself into a Trojan horse. There is no way that France, Germany, Sweden or Britain – the four EU countries that non-EU citizens most want to live in – will ever sell passports for cash. This is not only because they have properly democratic governments and electorates who would never permit it (and also because they have self-respect and they know the consequences of announcing financial desperation). It is also because the people who buy them will actually live there and not move on to, say, Malta.

The non-European press has, on the other hand, picked up a different angle: the hypocrisy of a government which says that it wants to attract people with 'talent' by selling them citizenship for cash, while telling migrants on rickety boats that Malta has no room for them and so they must be pushed back or absorbed by other EU member states.  The Australian press has linked Malta’s sale of citizenship directly to the troublesome issue of migration from North Africa, even illustrating their reports with pictures of poorly dressed, newly arrived asylum seekers who clearly cannot afford to pay €650,000 for their Maltese passports.

In all, after reading all those headlines, I was left with the feeling that this thing is going to snowball badly for Malta, and that our government has shown once more that it cannot think about consequences or even press reportage outside Malta. Its entire forma mentis is skewed towards how matters are perceived by the Maltese electorate, and even there, it has done really badly on this one. It is hard to see how the damage can possibly be undone now.