EU’s top court rules against Malta’s ‘golden passport’ programme

The European Court of Justice has ordered Malta to close its “golden passport” programme for violating European Union law, even after the Mediterranean island country suspended the programme for citizens of Russia and Belarus.

The programme “amounts to the commercialisation of the grant of the nationality of a member state and by extension that of union citizenship”, a judge at the court in Luxembourg said.

Under the programme, one of the last of its kind in Europe that allows wealthy people to buy EU citizenship, Malta “failed to fulfil its obligations” to the EU, the judge said.

Housing crisis

The European Commission launched infringement procedures against Malta and Cyprus in 2020 about their golden passport programmes.

After Cyprus in 2021 and Bulgaria in 2022 ended their programmes, Malta was one of the last holds out in a once-widely embraced scheme across Europe and the United Kingdom to drum up revenue – especially in some nations hit hard by the 2009 financial crisis.

But in the following decade, most EU states scrapped their programmes over their links to housing crises in Europe, fears of the programmes’ potential for white collar crime, corruption and money laundering, security concerns in the UK following the 2018 Salisbury poisoning, and then aggressive sanctions on Russian citizens following Moscow’s invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2021.

The court ruling also comes at a time that US president Donald Trump said he plans to start a “golden card” visa with a potential pathway to US citizenship for five million dollars