A total of 159 new Maltese citizenships have been granted through the Individual Investor Programme (IIP), industry sources have informed this newspaper.

Since the IIP legislation requires that aspiring new Maltese citizens have to reside in Malta for a full year before being granted Maltese citizenship, it stands to reason that the 159 new citizenships granted to foreign nationals have already been resident in the country for at least a year. 

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, in an interview with this newspaper last month, had hinted as much when he said after being asked about the first results from the IIP, “The first results are very encouraging…the first applications are in, and for the time being I’d rather stop short of quantifying those applications. There are, I can say, a lot of candidates who already live in Malta and who have shown interest in the programme.”

As such, it appears that the government did not have to wait even a year for the first tangible results of the IIP to come in.

While it is difficult to exactly quantify the amount of funds raised so far, since it is not known how many of the new citizenships were granted to primary applicants and how many were granted to family members, and questions put to the government have not been answered, some rough assumptions can, however, be made.

The least plausible scenario is that the 159 new citizens were all main applicants, meaning that they paid the full €650,000 sticker price per citizenship. This would have raised a total of €103,350,000 from new Maltese passport holders who were already resident in Malta. This is heads and shoulders above the €30 million the government had said would be raised in the first year of the scheme alone.

Since these new citizens were already resident in Malta for at least a year, the requirement to purchase a property worth at least €350,000, or to rent a property for €16,000 a month, would have already been in order.

The third requirement, to purchase €150,000 in stocks, bonds, debentures, special purpose vehicles or other investment vehicles would have also meant €23,850,000 in such investments.

A perhaps more rational division of the successful applicants could be that half of the applicants were main applicants only without any family members, and the other half of applicants were comprised of a primary applicant, their spouse and one child. That would mean, roughly speaking, 70 primary applicants in their own right, 30 main applicants, 30 spouses and 30 children.

In this scenario, the government would have raised €45.5 million from the 70 primary applicants applying unilaterally and €19.5 million from the main applicants with a family. Another €750,000 would have been raised from spouses, who application fees are €25,000 apiece, while a further €750,000 from the children if they are under the age of 18 (€25,000 each) or €1.5 million if the children are over 18 years of age (€50,000 each).  This scenario would have raised a total of €66.5 – €67.25 million.

In addition to spouses and children, citizenships for parents, who are aged 55 or over, of the main applicants pay €50,000 per citizenship.

All in all, and by any yardstick, the programme has already bettered the government’s original estimate of raising €30 million in the first year of the programme’s operation, and that is before any citizenships are granted to people not already resident in Malta. This will not happen until February 2015, when a year’s residence in the country from when the law came into force will be able to be proved.