EU's top court rules against Malta's 'golden passport' program

The European Court of Justice ordered Malta to close its “golden passport” program, the one of the last of its kind in Europe that allows wealthy people to buy EU citizenship, even after the small island country suspended the program for citizens of Ru...

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

The program “amounts to the commercialization 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 program, one of the last of its kind in Europe that allows wealthy people to buy EU citizenship, Malta “failed to fulfill its obligations” to the EU, the judge said.

The European Commission launched infringement procedures against Malta and Cyprus in 2020 about their golden passport programs. After Cyprus in 2021 and Bulgaria in 2022 ended their programs, 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 programs over their links to housing crises in Europe, fears of the programs’ potential for white collar crime, corruption and money laundering, security concerns in the U.K. 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 U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to start a “golden card" visa with a potential pathway to U.S. citizenship for $5 million.

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