The surprise announcement by the Deputy Prime Minister on Friday night that the government will remove the highly controversial confidentiality clause from the Individual Investment Programme is a major step forward in rendering the contentious scheme a little more palatable and it is most welcome.

Whether one agrees in principle with the concept of selling citizenships in the way that the government is doing, and whether one agrees that Maltese citizenships should be sold against a flat fee with no more tangible investment strings attached, the fact that the names of those people becoming Maltese citizens through the IIP were to remain forever shrouded in secrecy was, put simply, wrong.

However welcome it is that the clause has been dropped and that those acquiring citizenship through the IIP will have their names published in the Government Gazette like regular mortals who become Maltese citizens, this one step is not enough. More ‘fine tuning’ as mentioned by the government earlier on in the day on Friday is required if Malta’s reputation as an upstanding country is to be salvaged. But any additional fine-tuning that could possibly be done to the programme, we are sorry to say, may not be enough to salvage the country’s reputation. A considerable amount of damage has been done and such retrospective actions to limit that damage come across as mere tokens in the eyes of many.

The damage has been done and even if the government were to ditch the programme completely, the new image that the country is suffering will stick forever to a certain extent.

With the dropping of what was perhaps the most controversial detail of the programme, the IIP has not all of a sudden become a respectable one – it has merely become a little less unrespectable.

Those who are to apply for Maltese citizenship will still not be required to even set foot in their new country at any point in their lives. The programme is still a flat out citizenship programme and there is no residency requirement that will eventually lead to full-blown citizenship as other countries have done. Nor is there any need to make a tangible investment into the country, tangible in that it creates employment.

Yes, there is the ‘contribution’ to the National Development Fund, but why couldn’t the government have considered a lower contribution coupled with a more committed tangible investment into the country where it is needed most – in quality employment?

In fact, it was revealed on Friday that the programme’s concessionaire had originally advised the government that the IIP should be an investment programme, and that investment should have come first and foremost.  But the government at some point chose to swap an investment requirement into a pure flat fee for citizenship.

But the government seems to think that all this is just fine – that as long as another country does this or that, that it is all well and good for Malta to do as well. This kind of attitude is simply not acceptable. Malta needs to be leading the way, innovatively, by creating the most respectable programme of its kind in the world, and not simply selling out to marketing ploys and casting the widest citizenship net possible.

The government has said that the secrecy clause, which was most likely one of the programme’s leading marketing ploys, was the suggestion of the concessionaires. This argument does not wash, for the government could have simply ruled out such a preposterous suggestion – but it did not until it began to get wind of the inevitable maelstrom that the programme, and in particular the secrecy clause, was causing.

Readers need little reminding of the unsavoury press coverage the programme has received this week in the wake of Parliament’s approval – and rest assured that the criticism, especially from Malta’s fellow EU member states, will increase exponentially over the days and weeks to come.

Moreover, Malta’s hopes for burden sharing from its fellow EU member states when it comes to irregular immigrants – the impoverished sub-Saharan Africans and asylum seekers from war-torn countries such as Syria – are now whittled down to next to nothing. How can the government now beg for assistance to cope with any future influxes of these unfortunates when it opens the doors to the country and the EU as it has simply to make a quick buck?

Even with this damage limitation exercise of removing the secrecy clause, a lot of damage has been done, much of it irreparable, by the government’s initial approach to the matter. That approach was short-sighted and not serious enough to offset the natural misgivings associated with selling Maltese, and EU, citizenships.

Having failed in its first attempt, but no doubt having attracted a great deal of interest from prospective new citizens, the best the government can now do is to ‘fine tune’ this programme further into what it should have been from the beginning.

Anything short of that will bring the country and its citizens into disrepute for years to come.