The story of the moment is the government’s decision to sell Maltese passports for €650,000.
There is also an enticing discount for those who wish to obtain Maltese passports for any spouses, unmarried sons and daughters up to the age of 25, and even parents aged 55 and over. For those, the government will lop a whopping great €625,000 off the going rate, and they’ll get their Maltese passport for a mere €25,000 (or €50,000 for aged parents who don’t want to be left out). That’s cheap at the price.
There is huge controversy surrounding this news, not least because the government sprang it on an unsuspecting public that has been fed the propaganda that African immigrants must be pushed back because Malta is too small for them. If they return with a cheque book, though, the picture will now change. We’ll find room at the inn and not just that, but we’ll throw in a pillow gift of a nice maroon passport so that they may jettison their own less- desirable passports.
But unfortunately for the general public, and this is a blessing for the government, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum (so to speak) and the reporting got skewed to the wrong price-tag.
‘Maltese passports for sale at €650,000’ the headlines and the news reports are claiming, making them sound fairly costly (though not really, because they’re the price of a nice flat). But that’s horribly misleading, because that is not the actual price at which Malta’s passports are going to be sold.
Whoever devised this system did so precisely to sell Maltese passports at €25,000 – while masking this fact by saying that the ‘applicant’ must pay €650,000, knowing that the press and the public would notice only this figure and decide that this, and not €25,000, is the selling price. If Maltese passports have really been priced at €650,000 then everybody would be paying that amount. But if you analyse the situation, not even the two halves of a married couple are paying €650,000 each. The fact is that €675,000 buys two passports for a married couple. Stop for a moment and think about what this means.
If the husband buys a Maltese passport at €650,000, the Maltese government will throw one in for his wife at just €25,000. If there are any (unmarried) sons and daughters hanging around who want a Maltese passport too, all they have to do is add on another €25,000 for each. In terms of couples of equal status, the government, instead, speaks of an applicant (€650,000) and the spouse (€25,000). The €25,000 spouse is obviously the wife – you can read these things. And it figures, doesn’t it, that the wife’s Maltese passport is priced at exactly the same level as those of the children in the family. The €650,000 is the equivalent of ‘key money’ and is not the price of a Maltese passport.
The price of a Maltese passport works out to €25,000. Not many men (or women, for that matter) will be buying a Maltese passport in a relationship vacuum. There are very few single, childless, parentless people with a deep-rooted need to buy a Maltese passport. For every passport ‘sold’ at €650,000, we are also going to have to sell an average of four passports at €25,000 (wife and three children) and perhaps even another two at €50,000 (the grandparents). Maltese passports for a nuclear family of two parents and three children therefore come in at a not particularly impressive €750,000.
Yes, €750,000 for five Maltese passports. And this still leaves the not- insignificant matter of men in one of the target markets for this scheme, who may have four wives and 20 children. The law allows the minister discretion on whether to allow passports in polygamous situations. The way I work it out, should Manuel Mallia (or any of his successors) say so, a family coming from a country in which polygamous marriage is the norm, can obtain 25 Maltese passports for the piddling sum of €1.25 million. Selling passports to raise money in the short-term is about as clever as going to a loan shark for the money to pay off your bills. Yes, you get the money, but the problems you create for yourself will not go away.