Read this follow-up feature about Russian millionaires buying Maltese passports.
The story by Anna Nemtsova includes comments by Ilya Shumanov, the deputy head of Transparency International’s bureau in Moscow that showed The Daily Beast a list of 582 Russians who have bought E.U. passports in Malta just since the beginning of 2018. The group has been working to document all new Maltese citizens.
Once again we’ll know more about Maltese citizens from the work of journalists and anti-corruption activists of other country.
In the meantime, I found this quote significant. “A press attaché for the Maltese government defended the passport scheme recently. ‘The legal sale of passports to foreign nationals is a lucrative business for the Maltese government,’ he told The Daily Beast. ‘Without it we’d be broke.'”
That clumsy quote betrays the predicament of people dispatched to answer the question of the rest of the world: why do we do it?
Money. That’s why we do it. For people who live their lives out like that, that answer is self-explanatory.
Countries should not behave like that. There should be a higher standard to aspire to than pure greed: for individuals, families, communities and businesses: let alone governments.
And then they say that the rest of us make Malta look bad.