It may be the height of what we in the news industry call the silly season, but there is nothing silly about the international beating that Malta took once again yesterday thanks to the government’s ever-controversial cash-for-passports programme.

Yesterday the respected Brussels weekly newspaper Politico chose to place Malta’s IIP once again in the crosshairs and the story was taken up in true tabloid fashion by the UK’s Daily Express.  The latter seized on the issue as a means of justifying the UK’s recent Brexit vote – quoting a Conservative and eurosceptic British MP as saying that, “Malta is effectively deciding UK immigration policy”.

The local media, as well as Politico, have also recently criticised the way in which Malta publishes the list of new citizens – in alphabetical order of new citizens’ first names and instead of by their surnames.  This obviously runs against the grain of any official list of people’s names that has practically ever been published in alphabetical order.

The latest list of new Maltese citizens was published just this month and, once again, new citizens’ names were presented in alphabetical order in accordance with their last first names.  But this repeated anomaly is not down to a clerical error, it is most intentional and traces its roots back to Malta’s haggling with the European Commission over the passports-for-cash scheme.

When the programme had been first pitched back at the end of 2013, one of the main bones of contention had been the government’s insistence on not publishing the names of those who had purchased their citizenships – in other words it had insisted on keeping the names of the people purchasing Maltese citizenship a state secret.

In so many ways, the very notion ran against the grain of the very concept of citizenship of a country and to forming part of one’s adoptive community. No amount of money was enough, many had argued, to offset the fact that Malta will have incognito citizens, whose status as actual citizens of this country is known to none but a very select few.

It was also against the spirit of the decades-old Maltese practice of periodically publishing the names of those who are granted citizenship.  At the time the government was proposing two lists of new citizens: one list, which would be published, of all those who over the last year were granted Maltese citizenship through normal channels – i.e. through marriage, descent etc… - and another list of those who purchased Maltese citizenship, which would not be published.

But the opposition, Brussels and even some of the programme’s staunchest supporters viewed the prospect that the names of those people becoming citizens through the IIP would remain forever shrouded in secrecy as wrong on so many levels that the government backtracked and pledged the publication of the names.

And it did so despite the fact that the secrecy clause was undoubtedly one of the programme’s leading marketing enticements.  True, the names are being published - but with a difference. Before the citizenship programme began yielding its first new citizens, the government had always published the list of new citizens alphabetically by surname.  But since the advent of the IIP, it has been publishing the whole list of all categories of new citizens, as promised, but instead it did so alphabetically by first name.

The obvious ploy, which can be worked around with a little IT wizardry, was to disguise those who purchased their passports: whole families are rarely given Maltese citizenship in one fell swoop, except for those qualifying under the IIP. 

When the opposition leader had some time back queried the government’s opposition to publishing the list of those purchasing citizenships separately in the public domain, the Prime Minister said the Attorney General had been consulted and had advised the government that separating the two lists would have been against the law.

The regulator of the citizenship scheme acknowledged that the publication of the names of new citizens was putting off some prospective passport investors, and he suggested a debate on the publication of new citizens’ names.   He even suggested the list could be made available on a need to know basis.  This notion, to the government’s credit, was never implemented, most likely because of the same advice the AG had given the government previously, and it must have settled for the pseudo-secrecy afforded by de-alphabetising the list so that entire families purchasing Maltese citizenship, as is done in the IIP, could not be picked out quite so easily. 

The names of those purchasing citizenship are not secret, they are just a little more difficult to identify.