The comments made by the regulator of the country’s highly contentious Individual Investor Programme would be extremely concerning if they were in any way indicative of government policy. 

The regulator in his written, not off-the-cuff, remarks has in a nutshell bemoaned the fact that the names of those people purchasing Maltese citizenships are not kept secret and that banks’ due diligence as ‘unwarranted and uncalled-for ordeal’.

Now here are two ways of looking at this.  It is either actually the government’s unspoken policy being echoed by the regulator or it is the regulator speaking on his own steam.  Either way, there is serious cause for concern.

That is because either the government itself is ignoring the basic tenets of the agreement the government had struck with the European Commission, which was pushed through despite a vastly overwhelming vote against the scheme in the European Parliament, or the regulator is ignoring these fundamental principles.

According to the regulator, the names of citizens purchasing citizenship should not be published and should only be made available to parliamentarians, who would be bound by oaths of secrecy.  The recommendation follows pressure from citizenship-selling agents themselves, which the regulator was curiously most eager to champion in favour of passport sales over public policy.

Under the regulator’s suggestion, would it be just the names of those purchasing passports that would be privy to only parliamentarians who are sworn to secrecy, or would that also apply to new citizens who acquire citizenships through normal channels?

Malta now publishes its periodic lists of new citizens – in the alphabetical order of new citizens’ first names and instead of by their surnames, which camouflages those purchase citizenships as they usually do so with their family in tow. As such, sections of people with the same surnames on the list give away the fact that they have purchased citizenship.  This is disguised when listing people by their first names.

When the programme had been first pitched to the European Commission 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.

But the then opposition, Brussels and 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.

And when it did do so, the government ended up taking everyone for a ride with the list’s formatting.

Now it seems the scheme’s actual regulator wants to backtrack once again so as to increase sales, and presumably not just talent.

And as for the regulator’s swipe at the banks’ ‘number of over-rigid and very often insensitive and insensible measures that they are required to implement because of their international obligations’ when carrying out due diligence on IIP customers…the less the better.