One would have imagined that after all the controversy that had been raised over the citizenship by investment programme that the government would be going to extraordinary lengths to ensure the programme is following the letter of the law very precisely indeed.

The government has ignored many of the requirements for such individuals need to fulfil, chief amongst which is the one-year effective residency requirement they need to meet in order to become a citizen of this country.

But it now transpires that the government is also granting the new citizens who purchased their Maltese nationality rights that actual born and bred Maltese citizens have been and are still being denied.

Over and above the very questionable ethical merits of selling citizenships in return for a cash payment, the information - courtesy of the opposition Nationalist Party – that the government is defying the country’s very Constitution in order to give these cash-paying new citizens the right to vote is downright shocking.

And it becomes even more shocking when placed in the context of those Maltese citizens who are denied their right to vote by that same Constitution.  This is an affront to the nation as a whole and it is a particular affront to the Maltese nationals who reside abroad, be it in Australia or as close by as Italy.

According to Malta’s Constitution, in order to be eligible to vote one must be over 18 years of age, have Maltese citizenship and to have aggregately lived in Malta for six months out of the 18 months prior to the publication of an electoral register.

But when purchasing citizenship, rather than being automatically added to the electoral register one needs to apply to be eligible to vote.

Now according to allegations being made by the Nationalist Party, desk officers at the Electoral Commission sent e-mails to a number of IIP citizenship holders to inform them that they did not meet the necessary criteria, as laid out by Malta’s Constitution, to be placed on the Electoral Register. The party has identified 91 such cases out of a total of 100.

Despite this, these same individuals have nevertheless been given the right to vote.  By simple process of elimination, the criteria of being citizens had been met and those people were almost certainly over 18 years of age, which singles out the requirement to have lived in the country for six of the 18 months preceding an election as the problem highlighted by Electoral Commission staff.

The European Commission has been taking Malta to task since at least 2011 over the disenfranchisement of Maltese voters.  Malta is, in fact, one of just five EU member states who inflict voter disenfranchisement on their citizens who live abroad.  Out of those five countries (Malta plus Denmark, Ireland, Cyprus, and the United Kingdom) Malta’s six months out of the last 18 rule are viewed, by far, as the most prohibitive in the bloc.

But in the meantime it seems that just as the requirement to have lived in the country for an effective year before becoming a citizen is being waived time and time again for those purchasing citizenship - one of the European Commission’s foremost requirements when authorising Malta to proceed with the controversial programme - the government is also waiving the residency requirement when it comes to the right to vote. 

This is in an outright slap in the face to those Maltese who are continuously denied that very same right – itself a rarity in Europe and a state of affairs that Europe is attempting to force Malta to set right.  One wonders how Europe will eventually react, in the context of the previous raging controversy over Malta’s IIP programme, to this new development.