Want EU citizenship? That will be $865,000 please

The government of Malta has launched a plan to sell citizenship with practically no strings attached for 650,000 euros (Dh3,221,063, $865,000) to help reduce the nation’s deficits.

The scheme is targeted at rich citizens from countries such as Russia and China and will allow them effectively to buy citizenship of the European Union, which Malta joined in 2004.

Citizens of European Union countries have the right to live and work in any other country in the union.

The plan, approved on Wednesday, is expected to go into effect within a few weeks.

Buyers beware however: Opposition Nationalist Party lawmakers have vowed to repeal the law and revoke all citizenships sold if their party returns to power.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat predicted that selling citizenship will bring 30 million euros into government coffers annually and help ease the country’s deficit.

In Brussels, European Union spokesman Michele Cercone noted that Malta and other member states have full sovereignty to decide how and to whom they grant nationality.

The European Court of Justice has on several occasions confirmed the principle of international law that it is for each member state to lay down the conditions for acquisition of its nationality.

The move comes five months after Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, was engaged in a dispute with the European Union over the numbers of illegal migrants coming into Malta via boats operated by people smugglers. He said the 17,000 people who had arrived illegally during the previous decade were putting an unacceptable strain on an island with a population of just 400,000 and little more land than the Isle of Wight.