Finance Minister Edward Scicluna was short on replies to the news that a Maltese passport buyer was indicted in the US after dodging a massive $1.8 billion in aluminium tariffs.

“We know very little about it, so we’re not going to comment. The US government [is looking into it] because this is about tariffs,” he said.

Asked whether the government was at all looking into the case, given that it does involve what is a Maltese citizen and what sort of effect this could have on Malta’s reputation, Scicluna said: 

“Any citizen in the world has to be a citizen of somewhere. So he just happened to have a Maltese passport. It is something in the USA it is a business thing. I don’t think it implicates Malta was conniving with this person in order to hide anything.”

The man at the centre of the case Chinese billionaire, Liu Zhongtian, became a Maltese citizen through the country’s controversial cash-for-passports scheme. According to documents, Zhongtian lives in a modest small first floor flat in Naxxar.

The scheme has long been the subject for criticism beyond putting a €650,000 price tag on the Maltese nationality, due to an opaque system that publicly fails to identify who the passport buyers are.

Pressed on this, Scicluna was evasive, stumbling to say:

“Whether it is a citizen of the UK, of Malta, European or otherwise. It’s not something you say ‘ah’ or that you take it lightly, of course not, but on the other hand that’s the situation, it happens in the world, we’ll have to see what’s it all about.”

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