There was never a time when Malta’s passport-selling scheme was not suspect. The “others do it” excuse was ever convenient but ever hollow. ‘Others’ do things that look like what we do but no one does it quite like us.

Last week’s ‘Passport Papers’ are the documentary evidence of what the Maltese authorities and their accomplices have been denying for eight years. Every time the country was assured the scheme was simply about attracting talent and investment to Malta it was a lie. Every time applicants said they had lived here for a year it was likely a lie. Every time the Maltese authorities assured the world we were doing proper due diligence it was a lie. Every time a new passport-holder told an immigration official or a banker somewhere else in the world they were Maltese it was a lie.

And every time Henley & Partners and the Maltese government denied stories in the press that exposed these lies, they lied when they denied them.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, characteristically, smelt the rat when it had still been a twinkle in Joseph Muscat’s eye. She denounced the idea as intellectually abhorrent and she pronounced it, entirely accurately, as an open door for financial crime, bribery and corruption.

The passport scheme is a link in the same chain that includes Pilatus Bank (Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad held St Kitts passports issued by Henley & Partners), the laundering of embezzled Azerbaijani money (through Pilatus Bank), Electrogas (where the Azerbaijanis were partners), the Montenegro wind farm and on and on and on.

For this, law firms and accountancy firms were made complicit with applicants and landlords, callously lying about the residential status of passport acquirers. A professional community has been compromised, nudging and winking on their clients’ behalf. This is the same professional community that serves the financial services and gaming industries and, of course, every other economic activity in the country. And we are supposed to trust them to certify as true the declarations of people in businesses?

For this, two government agencies – Identity Malta and the IIP agency – were created in watertight secrecy so that our authorities could pretend to believe false declarations about residence. They accepted applications carrying addresses of boarded up basements, toilet-free garages, even ghost buildings that haven’t been built.

Even as DW, Rai, CBS, NBC, ARD, the BBC, Buzz Feed, RSI, and many other worldwide news services visited buildings where talented billionaires declared they lived but no one did (I know, I took most of them there), Malta’s government agencies refused to check the addresses on the application forms in their possession.

In one case revealed last week, the government even lied about the name of a passport holder in The Malta Government Gazette. If it was pre­pared to lie about this, what else does the government lie about in its official publications? And are we supposed to trust all other statements made by official sources?

For this, journalists have been branded traitors and liars. When a committee at the UK House of Commons quoted an investigation published on my website when it analysed the relationship between Henley & Partners and Cambridge Analytica, the Maltese government reacted angrily. It issued a diplomatic note verbale naming me and branding me a partisan liar. But the Commons committee had the evidence in hand and they ignored Malta’s foreign minister. That’s Carmelo Abela, the guy who has made a career of projecting on others his own faults.

My reporting from two years ago has now been confirmed by fresh leaks. I wasn’t the liar. Your government was- Manuel Delia

My reporting from two years ago has now been confirmed by fresh leaks. I wasn’t the liar. Your government was.

For this they lied, and they lied, and they lied, to each other and to the world. For this? What’s this? What did they do this for? Money.

Money as opposed to investment; as opposed to capital that generates economic acti­vity, labour and a ripple effect of benefits in the economy. The IIP scheme does none of that. The IIP scheme deposits cash in the government’s account which it then uses to gaslight us for criticising the scheme and wanting our government to be poorer. We want our government to work harder at generating economic activity where we can all earn an honest buck. We could all be rich if we started robbing banks but that doesn’t make it right.

And then there’s the money that fuelled the property specu­lation, the rampant building of apartments intended to remain empty, generating cash from fake lease agreements.

In other words, an ecological Ponzi scheme where the environment is stolen from future generations to pay for today’s avaricious greed. All lubricated by a state-made lie.

Many find the complaint that we have cheapened our citizenship by putting a price on it sentimentalist crap. I disagree but that’s not my point. Perhaps even some of those many might now realise that we have cheapened our environment and squandered our credibility. We have sullied the only asset we had when we faced the world: our name. And we have transformed our once verdant and azure home into a jungle of pigeon holes where nobody lives.

Through Simon Busuttil and Adrian Delia, the Nationa­list Party has been consistent in its opposition to the scheme. Last week, the opposition’s criticism was vindicated by what the press has exposed. And, yet, the PN’s reaction to these confirmatory revelations has been oddly muffled, almost muted.

It sounds almost as if critics of the government are exhausted about being right and being proven right all the time. Nothing changes anyway. After exposés about the conduct of a similar scheme in Cyprus, the government of that country, blushing with embarrassment, abolished the scheme.

And we? Come to Malta for 12 hours. Swear an oath to allegiance to our president. We’ll give you a passport. Don’t forget to drop a million on your way out. Because that’s how we run our country.