Imagine living in a country where you and your family are in constant danger of being killed. Imagine being so desperate that your only option is to leave and start a perilous journey for a better life. Imagine crossing deserts on foot, exposing yourself to violence at every corner. Imagine, then, giving up all your life savings to put yourself and your family on a rickety boat, destination unknown. Imagine if the authorities in other countries just looked on and failed to help as you were trying to give your children a life without persecution.
Actually, you don’t have to imagine it – it happens for real. About 100 people left the shores of Libya a few days ago and died at sea, our Mediterranean sea.
Now imagine another scenario.
Imagine you’re wont for nothing in the world. You’re not in danger, no one is persecuting you and, thanks to a lifelong of dabbling in dubious affairs, you live a grand life of luxury. You’d like access to a bigger market so you can move your illicit millions around, so you put aside one of your millions to buy yourself an EU passport, even though you’re Russian. Imagine if the authorities in other countries overlook your crooked deals and give you a red-carpet treatment. Imagine if all it takes to expand your horizons is a snap of the fingers and a couple of signatures.
Actually, you don’t have to imagine anything – it happens for real. For a three-hour trip to Malta, a fenkata receipt, a pastizz and about €600,000, we welcome you with a limousine, slot in a tête-à-tête with the prime minister and give you a Maltese passport. Veru bargain ħi.
Remember back when the scheme was launched in 2014 in partnership with Henley & Partners? Joseph Muscat used to tell us that he was “proud to be a salesman” selling passports to “high net worth” people because the scheme would pull Malta out of its “prehistoric” economy and catapult it straight into the future.
Nothing would stop him from his world tour of pitching. Not even the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. A week after she was killed, he said ‘what the heck’ to a traumatised country in full blown protests and set off to Dubai to fish more of those “net worth” assets.
Now, the Passport Papers – a leak of Henley & Partners documents passed on to Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation – have revealed the non-worthiness of these passport buyers.
It is very clear that the sort of foreigners who buy our Maltese passports are oligarchs, fugitives, money launderers and the ilk. Did he say prehistory? Or was it sophistry? Because, let’s not forget that, as is being alleged, Muscat’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, took €100,000 in kickbacks from these passport sales.
It’s all so disgusting that I think we’ve all reached a point where we desperately want to wish it all away. But we can’t. Rather, we are having to suffer the brunt and the painful repercussions of the country’s reputation gone to the dogs.
Just go and try and open a new account in a bank. It’s a process as odious as pulling out your teeth, one by one, in manner of Castaway. Because, obviously, everyone is now a suspect money launderer. Ask professionals in the financial business sector – everything is at a standstill: their day job has become filling in form after form to prove that they are above board.
Are the developers so miserly that they’d rather risk the death of a young family than part with some pennies?- Kristina Chetcuti
How has Castille reacted to the Passport Papers? A junior minister – one of those with the typical Pulse side-parting – was wheeled forward to tut-tut. He said: “Iss hey, this is an attack on the integrity of the scheme” followed by: “Iss, hey, who is financing these attacks eh? Eh?”.
Why, maybe the penniless migrants, per chance?
To put things in context, this junior minister, whose name is as irrelevant as his words, worked as “person of trust” under Muscat and, at the same time, as “economic consultant advisor” for Brain Tonna’s Nexia BT, which opened his buddy’s secret Panama company. Really, the intricacies of this web are worthy of an antique piece of Maltese lace (a receipt of which would probably earn you a passport).
There is only one possible way out of this: to promptly cease the scheme. Short-term, it’s raking in the money but, long-term, no one will want to have anything to do with the island. If this rotten scheme is not scrapped, it can only portend a very bleak future for our children. Perhaps then we will know the true plight of migrants first-hand.
Construction excavations next door to Matthew Montebello’s family home mean that his children are scared to go to bed at night, fearing they’ll end up buried under their own home.
The 36-year-old father noticed a very worrying pattern: buildings collapsing these last few years, including Miriam Pace’s home in Ħamrun, had a common factor – they were built on the same type of rock, the middle globigerina limestone.
He commissioned prominent geologist Peter Gatt to make a geological study of the area. The report confirmed Montebello’s worst worries: the excavations next door, which include the construction of 28 garages three-storeys underground, posed “high risks of failure”. This is clearly a tragedy waiting to happen.
Are the developers so miserly that they’d rather risk the death of a young family than part with some pennies and pay for an alternative accommodation for the family until the works are ready?
This is the society flourishing under the socialist government: a society where hard-working workers are not even safe in their own homes because those dripping in liri can do as they please.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
twitter: @krischetcuti