The government has failed to reply to a Freedom of Information request seeking to find out who provided advice on its citizenship programme before concessionaire Henley and Partners were officially brought in and given an unprecedented role in the scheme.

According to the Freedom of Information Act, “the public authority to which a request is made” – in this case the Office of the Prime Minister – has to decide whether the request is to be granted and inform the applicant of its decision within 20 working days.

The request was made on 14 January, and the 20 working day deadline elapsed more than a week ago.

The government was asked to provide the list of individuals and entities which provided advice on the Individual Investor Programme prior to the publication of the public service concession dossier: the call for expressions of interest which led to Henley & Partners making a winning bid.

The question was motivated by the fact that the scheme is the only one on earth which is effectively managed by a private sector concessionaire. While the scheme was eventually developed with the assistance of Henley & Partners, the role of a concessionaire was clearly outlined in the public service concession dossier.

Of course, the government may have blindly opted for an untried and untested model, but it is, perhaps, more likely that it received some form of advice before producing the dossier, a highly-technical document.

A conflict of interest?

The role of a concessionaire was set to be implemented in just one more country – Antigua and Barbuda – but the Antiguan senate rejected the proposed scheme twice before it was revised substantially, and the government ended up assuming the responsibilities it was to surrender to the concessionaire.

As it happens, Henley & Partners was the company which was set to become Antigua and Barbuda’s concessionaire, before its role was reduced to a six-month consultancy contract which expired in December.

That the company was involved in the only scheme whose proposed structure mirrored Malta’s own may be sheer coincidence, but it can also suggest a potential conflict of interest should it have been involved in advising the government in the first place.

In fact, a losing bidder, Arton Capital, has insisted that Henley did just that, filing a court application calling for the cancellation of the contract on the basis of a conflict of interest and an unfair advantage.

Curiously, a two-year-old story published by Reuters quotes Henley CEO Eric Major as stating that his company was advising “several other countries that want to adopt citizenship by investment”, including Malta and Croatia.

When contacted, former Finance Minister Tonio Fenech had denied that this was the case, noting that Henley was advising the government on its global residence programme, and that citizenship and residence were often conflated.

However, Mr Major had told The Times of Malta last November that the company had held discussions with the previous government on implementing the same scheme – a claim which only serves to suggest that the company provided the advice which led it to win a highly lucrative contract, granting it an unprecedented level of control over a citizenship-by-investment programme.

Labour Party similarly opts for silence

Questions were also sent to the Labour Party, asking it whether it had received any advice on citizenship programmes before the 2013 general election. However, the party similarly ignored this newspaper’s request.

Despite the importance of the scheme – the government and the party have frequently bragged that it will bring €1 billion of “investment” to the country – there is no mention of any citizenship-by-investment programme in Labour’s electoral manifesto.

Of course, the programme could have been devised in the first three months of a Labour government, but if this was the case, it would make it even more unlikely that the government received no outside advice on the programme before it invited bidders to come forward.

In the meantime, a question that remains unanswered is whether Henley & Partners had any contact with the Labour Party before it was elected to government – and whether the company made any donations to the party. Any explanation of the possible conflict of interest involved would be superfluous.