Marketing the IIP: the good and the bad

There is both good and bad in the Prime Minister’s surprise phone call to Friday’s special edition of Xarabank that raised funds for children’s cancer charity Puttinu cares, during which he announced a €5 million donation from the National Development and Social Fund – the fund handles the cash garnered from the sale of Maltese citizenships.

First, the good. There is no way imaginable that such a sum being directed towards children with cancer could be considered a bad thing under any circumstances. Those children are in dire need of those funds when they need specialised treatment abroad. Their families are in urgent need of those funds and of the properties in the UK that those funds purchase if they are to remain near their children in their darkest hours.

This is an absolute and there is no plausible way for anyone with a soul to deny that. That, as a starting point, is a given, it is utterly indisputable. The fact that charities such as Puttinu Cares and the Malta Community Chest Fund go to such lengths to collect the funds that they do, in order to pick up the slack where the state falls short, is perhaps another matter altogether that warrants a discussion in its own right.

But when it comes to a government as politi- cally-savvy as this one, one that rarely misses a good public relations opportunity, the stunt takes on a somewhat new meaning. The move certainly had the desired effect among a slice of the populace yesterday which heaped praised on the Prime Minister for his perceived generosity, seemingly unaware that these were national funds that were dished out; after all it was not the Prime Minister who dug deep into his own pockets to donate.

There is, after all, very little doubt that the government’s IIP scheme is in need of a little feel good factor after the criticism it received from buying into two local banks, and perhaps because those dots connecting the scheme’s concessionaires and the now infamous Cambridge Analytica are becoming that much closer to being coherently joined.

Moreover, was the National Development and Social Fund that administers the passport wealth not meant to have been ring-fenced, with concrete plans on what to do with those funds, and on where and how to invest them?

These kind of one-off stunts, most were led to believe, do not fit into that formula. But of course the Prime Minister is the Prime Minister and we will suppose he has a prerogative to call in from Australia, where he is currently with his family, and take part in such a stunt.

As of early this morning, reams had already been written on the subject across all the social media platforms. The usual completely polarised government critics took the stunt to task, while the more blinkered champions of the government practically beatified the Prime Minister.

Even the Archbishop was dragged into the fray, on Easter weekend of all times, after ‘ retweeting’ a government-critical opinion piece published on The Shift News website, with people asking him why he wasn’t following suit and matching the Prime Minister’s princely sum. The answer to that should be self-evident.

At the end of the day, what we can say is that at least € 5 million of those funds, derived as they are from a morally and technically questionable scheme, went to some good use, although, truth be told, the sum is a mere a drop in the passport cash ocean.

And on the bright side, the stunt may encourage more generosity still the next time around – leading by example is always a positive thing. Then again, it is said that one should never look a gift horse in the mouth, but this one is certainly the exception that proves the rule. We should, in fact, look very closely indeed.