­­Brussels is expected to send the government a “legal questionnaire” on the controversial cash-for-citizenship scheme to help establish whether Malta is breaching EU rules.

The questionnaire will be dispatched next week with a short deadline for replies to be sent back, senior diplomats in Brussels said yesterday.

Malta will be asked for explanations on what Brussels considers to be legal grey areas in the way the scheme has been drawn up – and on which it is contemplating legal action against Malta.

Sources said the questionnaire forms part of a thorough exercise being conducted by the European Commission’s legal services and the replies will be crucial to establish whether the EU Treaty will be breached by the Individual Investor Programme, as Brus-sels suspects.

“This forms part of our verification process of the Maltese programme. At the end of this legal exercise, our lawyers will be in a position to decide whether to push for a fully fledged infringement process or seek more information,” the sources said.

This newspaper is informed that the government has been warned the Commission is seriously considering starting infringement procedures against the island over its scheme to sell Maltese – and therefore EU – passports. At the same time, EU officials are making it clear that Brussels would prefer to hold further talks on the scheme in the hope of reaching an amicable solution with Malta rather than engage in “a legal war”.

Informal contacts between the Commission and the government were held yesterday on a technical and political level on the margins of an informal meeting of justice and home affairs ministers in Athens, Times of Malta learnt.

Malta is represented at the meeting by Justice Parliamentary Secretary Owen Bonnici, who was deeply involved in the drafting of the citizenship scheme.

It is understood that Dr Bonnici had informal talks with European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. The EU Observer, a news portal in Brussels, yesterday dedicated its main news story to Malta’s investor programme, saying the Commission was preparing to legally challenge the scheme.

According to the report, the EU’s legal services are looking at filing potential infringement proceedings on the basis of article 4.3 of the EU Treaty, which lays down that member states must act “pursuant to the principle of sincere cooperation”.

EU Observer said the logic was that if Malta sold nationality to, say, a Russian oligarch, it was in fact selling the right to live in all 28 EU member states, putting fellow members at risk if due diligence failed to weed out criminals.

Finance Minister Edward Scicluna yesterday referred to what he had told a European Parliament committee on December 5 about changes to the scheme. He insisted that “no one really followed that speech in Brussels”.