While the European commission is powerless to stop Malta’s sale of passports, it is empowered to take damage limitation measures to safeguard European security and may impose limits on free movement in the Schengen area, Former Head of the European Parliament Office and PN MEP candidate Peter Agius said.

“Given that this government has made it impossible to identify the new Maltese citizens, Europe may be constrained to put limits onto all those holding a Maltese passport.”

Writing in an opinion piece on The Malta Independent, Agius took aim at Malta’s IIP scheme. “My thesis is that in the longer-term the reputational damage and the risks to European standards of security and governance will outweigh the benefits from the Individual Investor Programme short-term bonanza. Recent Commission statements indicate that the effect of that may be carried by all of us holding a Maltese passport.”

The IIP scheme in Malta has been a controversial one from the start.

Agius also took aim at the lack of indication as to who purchased citizenship, and who acquired it through other means in the yearly published list, highlighting that this “can only mean that we might have people who land here in their private jet, sign the papers and get their certificate, and then fly out again to go to London or Frankfurt or wherever else they are really based.”

“These new Maltese citizens may be persons of the highest integrity and I am sure that most of them will be, but by any standard in the civilised world, wealth on its own is not indicative of one’s law-abiding character. This is one reason why our EU partners are worried about the system concocted by Labour and the foreign contractors who administer it. It should also worry us, not only because of the strain it puts on our relationship with other EU Member States but also because it may, in the longer term, affect our the validity of own passport.”

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