The government would be very ill-advised indeed if it is planning to play any more aces it may still have up its sleeve with respect to the Individual Investor Programme (IIP).

Malta simply cannot afford yet another debacle because of the citizenship scheme and the government’s reluctance to issue a legal notice defining exactly what residency will entail gives one cause to doubt its real intentions.

The government would, on the other hand, do very well were it to simply accept the agreement it has struck with the European Commission and implement an acceptable one-year residency requirement, which, at the end of the day, will require a would-be new Maltese citizen to be physically present in the country for six months of that one year as per the international taxation model, at least according to European Commission sources who spoke to our sister daily newspaper earlier this week.

But while the European Commission refers to a six-month requirement, the government is referring to paragraph 10 of the Citizenship Act, which, in short, vaguely stipulates that in order to become a naturalised citizen of Malta, one must satisfy the minister that they have resided in Malta for a 12-month period.

But even if Malta were to take that a step further and impose the six-month requirement of a physical presence in the country when it does publish a legal notice amending the Act, which is apparently what Brussels is expecting, there are still ways to go around that. The government could very well put a six-month requirement down on paper, but the ways in which that six-month period will be ascertained, monitored and regulated would be another matter altogether.

Statements this week by the government in the wake of the deal with the European Commission, its beating around the bush on the subject and the fact that a legal notice amending the Citizenship Act once again were not published this week are curious indeed. And these actions have prompted many to wonder if and how the government may be seeking a loophole in the residency agreement struck this week with Brussels.

For starters, if the requirement is to be a six-month physical presence in the country, why didn’t the Prime Minister just say as much this week? Instead, what he somewhat cryptically said was that IIP applicants will not have to spend 365 days in Malta prior to gaining citizenship but, he added, this does not mean that they will never have to set foot in Malta.

It is strange that the government has not yet published the legal notice amending the Act, when the legal amendments were drafted and approved in the presence of European Commission officials this week.

This seemingly inexplicable delay has fuelled speculation that the government has another ace up its sleeve, or that it is desperately seeking one to minimise the effect that the residency requirement will have on the programme’s marketability.

It was, after all, pure marketability that has driven the government’s citizenship programme from day one – from the unacceptable secrecy clause and right down to the fact that as matters stood before this week’s residency requirement hammered out with the European Commission, that a would-be citizen would, technically speaking, never even have to set foot in the country once in order to gain citizenship.

That the government only removed the secrecy clause under duress from the local and international media, large swathes of the Maltese public and possibly other pressures demonstrates the fact that the scheme’s marketability was the primary concern. The obstinate stance by the home affairs minister during talks on the citizenship scheme as reported in today’s issue, also speaks volumes of the government’s mindset and its intention to not have a residency requirement introduced to the programme at any cost.

As such, it stands to reason that the government had opposed the residency requirement and only buckled to the European Commission this week in the face of a real threat of legal action against the country, and possibly an interim cease and desist order once the case were to go to the European Court of Justice as had been the case with the spring hunting court case.

But, as it happened, the government is now attempting to play down the fact that it bowed to pressure from Brussels and that it had introduced the residency requirement only under duress. This is perhaps best evidenced by the Prime Minister’s absurd statement on national television in the immediate wake of the agreement with the EC that the residency clause had simply been tweaked from a six-month requirement to that of one year.

The statement is absurd because there was never any residency requirement whatsoever and the only six-month period ever mentioned had dealt with the minimum time required for due diligence tests to be carried out on prospective citizens – a residency requirement was never present in any of the different forms the IIP has taken since it was first thrust upon the country and the government had from the outset been adamantly against it. The Prime Minister’s comments to the contrary are tantamount to simply pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.

Undoubtedly, the removal of the secrecy clause was the first real blow, a huge one, to the marketability of the programme. And the added requirement to reside in the country for six out the 12 months immediately leading up to the granting of citizenship has been another considerable blow to the all out sale of citizenships. This will be an onerous new requirement for gaining Maltese citizenship, and it is one that will see it appeal wane in the eyes of many multimillionaires or billionaires. 

The government has said that it has now reserved the right to increase the capping of citizenships granted to over 1,800 – perhaps in a bid to offset a foreseen drop in overall demand because of the residency requirement. The government had, at least up until 7 January, insisted that it had no intention whatsoever of increasing that cap – now things have changed with the introduction of a residency requirement.

An increase in the capping would be far better than an attempt to tweak residency requirements to benefit those looking to acquire citizenship through the IIP. The government, however, is being coy about its intentions.

The Opposition is correct to reserve its judgement on the new and improved IIP until the legal notice is published because, it is said and it is certainly true in this case, the devil is in the detail.

The last thing the country needs is to suffer yet another blow to its credibility through its ham-fisted handling of the IIP, enough is now truly enough.