When the government of Malta announced that it would be selling citizenship for €650,000 with no residency requirements, the European Commission was aghast.
Not only was the EU’s executive wing aghast, but so were individual European citizens as well as Maltese citizens. The plan drew the consternation of the Nationalist Party as well as some Labour MPs.
Everyone saw it for what it was – a passport for sale without a residency requirement. The government said that it would ensure that high value individuals would apply for it and be subjected to rigorous vetting. It did nothing to placate the detractors. After a fair amount of haranguing, the government altered its plan and to qualify for citizenship, a person had to reside in Malta for at least one year.
In the end, after the whole furore, the European Commission gave its go ahead and things settled down. Then the elephant in the room suddenly became visible. While Malta was going to show its hand and play its cards, there were numerous EU countries (some of those very same ones that howled in protest at Malta’s plan) had their own covert plans to draw in people to apply for residency against payment.
The actual scale of the plans have only come to light in recent months. Reuters recently carried out an investigation and established that there are several countries in the EU that offer citizenship or residency in exchange for cash. Reuters listed the following: Cyprus, Greece, Austria, Bulgaria, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and last but not least, the UK.
One such investigation took the Reuters team to Lithuania, where a Litas 10,000 (approximately €3,500) startup investment will buy you temporary residency and permission to travel within Europe.
The team looked up the records for a business hub with 99 firms under one roof. What they found was a deserted grey two-story graffiti clad building that had not been opened for years. The Vilnius police were shocked at what they saw and said that the building and several others are used by thousands of non-EU citizens as the registering address for businesses set up in the country of three million. It is estimated that almost half the addresses given are fake, with the applicants collecting their permit and flying out of the country that same day.
The ploy is an easier and safer way to move to the region than the journeys undertaken by poor immigrants risking their lives in the hands of ruthless people-traffickers. But it achieves the end result nonetheless.
Malta now seems to have the relevant structures in place to avoid these pitfalls. The system as originally proposed was flawed, but after pressure by the European Commission, the Nationalist Party and Joe Public, we seem to have got it right. Malta’s system is probably the most transparent there is in Europe.