Malta is the sole remaining EU member state to offer citizenship by investment after Bulgaria and Cyprus scrapped their programs under pressure from the European Commission. The Commission brought a legal challenge against Malta in 2022.
A ruling in Malta’s favor could encourage other member states to revive or launch their own citizenship-by-investment programs, said Eka Rostomashvili of the advocacy group Transparency International.
"We see a really big risk of other golden passport schemes coming back," she said. "So EU citizenship can once again become up for grabs by those who can afford it and seriously undermine global anti-corruption efforts.”
Cyprus scrapped its program in 2020 after an Al Jazeera investigation revealed deep corruption. By October 2023, the Mediterranean island nation had revoked 233 golden passports, OCCRP reported last December.
They included a sanctioned arms dealer operating out of Russia and Cyprus, as well as Jho Low, a fugitive who allegedly funneled $4.5 billion from 1MDB, a Malaysian state investment fund, into his own accounts.
A Maltese official told OCCRP in April that he would look into the son of a Russian oil executive who obtained a passport, and was later convicted in the U.K. for money laundering. Malta has argued at the Court of Justice of the European Union that its checks are robust, and that it rejects about one third of citizenship applications.
The Commission, however, did not base its case on the risk that Malta might provide citizenship to undesirable individuals. Instead, the Commission argues that citizenship must be based on a “genuine link” to a country, rather than payments or investments.
In his legal opinion, Advocate General Anthony Michael Collins wrote that EU legislation does not require any such link, and member states “have decided that it is for each of them alone to determine who is entitled to be one of their nationals.”
Nils Seidel, an EU law researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles, said the role of the advocate general is to provide “an additional check before the final decision” of the Court of Justice.
Saskia Bricmont, a European Green Party member of the EU parliament, said Collins’ opinion was “quite disappointing.”
“There is discrimination, obviously, created by those schemes between the people who are fleeing their country and having to go through hell in order to enter Europe, compared to very wealthy individuals accessing EU citizenship,” she said.
Seidel said that, if it loses this case, the Commission could launch another legal challenge based on different issues, such as discrimination or money laundering risks.
“If it can be shown that Malta, by allowing this practice, opens the door to money laundering or corruption — and this can be proven with evidence — then this could be an additional link for declaring those measures as contrary to EU law,” he said.