Malta's Government has approved a controversial plan to attract "high value" people to the island by selling passports for 650,000 ($1 million).
The scheme is aimed at rich citizens from the likes of Russia and China, and will allow them effectively to buy citizenship of the European Union, which Malta joined in 2004.
It is expected to attract up to 300 people a year and is already understood to have had 45 potential applicants, raising the government about 30 million in much-need revenues.
But the Maltese Opposition said the process used to vet applications lacked transparency, and is unhappy that applicants' identities will not be publicly disclosed. Simon Busuttil, the leader of the Opposition Nationalist Party, has pledged to revoke the passports if his party gets into power again. Busuttil, who sits on a monitoring committee that has access to the applicants' names, has also threatened to disclose their identities, which could frighten off publicity-shy oligarchs.
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.
