Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/694236
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 19 JUNE 2016 9 MATTHEW AGIUS STUCK in a foreign country, un- able to leave and unable to work – it is the stuff nightmares are made of. But for one Swiss-born Italian woman, this situation has been a part of her life for nearly two years. Heidi Gufler has lived in Gozo with her three children since 2010, after her marriage broke down in 2002, but in 2014 she realised that it was going to be very hard for her to leave. Gufler's Italian passport, the doc- ument on which her children had also been listed, expired in 2014. But when she went to the Ital- ian embassy to try and renew the travel document, she claims she was told that her estranged hus- band's signature was required. The woman was simply told that this was "procedure" and without the signature she would need to file a court case in Malta, after which the issue would be at the mercy of the Italian courts. Contacting her ex-husband is not an option, she explained. In spite of him sending regular alimony payments and withdrawing court proceedings against her, she claims he is refusing to assist her or their children. "He is not signing just to make life difficult," she remarks. But more worryingly, Gufler says that when she had gone to the Ital- ian embassy in May 2015 to follow up her application for a new pass- port, she was met with blank faces. "They did not know about us. We were not even there." She re-sub- mitted all the forms. In November 2015, she paid an- other follow-up visit to the em- bassy and, astonishingly, her ap- plication had been lost again. After that, she engaged Gozitan lawyer Larry Formosa to assist her in this peculiar situation. Formosa had li- aised with the Italian consulate and submitted her application – for the third time. But to Heidi Gufler's utter disbe- lief, when she called at the embassy in March 2016, asking for an up- date on the applications, she was told that the documents had been lost for the third time. "We had spent two hours filling in forms at the embassy on the pre- vious occasion, but the same man we had given the documents to didn't recognise us when we went again." That was followed by a great deal of waiting. She alleged that the em- bassy's First Secretary, Enrico Berti had promised to write to Gufler's ex-husband and, in the absence of a response within 10 days, he would allow her to renew the pass- port. But there was more heartbreak in store for the mother. After those 10 days had elapsed, on the very day that she was meant to go and renew her document, she received a phone call from the embassy tell- ing her that her children's pass- ports were OK but that "her name was blocked." Stumped, Gufler asked her un- cle – a policeman in Switzerland – to investigate from the Swiss end. Some days later, he asked her to send a copy of her children's school certificates, which she duly sent. Three days later, more bad news: the Bolzano passport office "had received no papers from the Mal- ta embassy." They wrote to Berti again and were told that the Italian police had blocked her passport renewal on the system. "Nobody knows why," said the woman. She suspects that it might have been because she had not sent a registered letter to her children's school, informing it that they were going abroad. This might have caused the school authorities to re- port the matter to the police, Gu- fler said, asking why she had not been told or assisted in this regard by Italy's representatives in Malta. "Is it not up to the embassy to get the case sorted out?" the woman asked. For someone under so much pressure, Heidi Gufler smiles a lot, but the strain she is under is visible on her face. Her son said his father had made contact through social media and had asked him to go visit him in Switzerland, "but this is impossi- ble without a valid passport!" she laughed. "I don't know how much longer I can afford a lawyer. I can't open a bank account without a passport and my son cannot receive his sti- pend as his expired ID card cannot be renewed without a passport." Neither can she apply for VAT for a business she planned to open and, although it wasn't mentioned, it would be very hard to find above- board employment without a valid ID. Gufler is on the ropes, all her efforts having been thwarted. "Go- ing to the press is the last option. I have tried everything else," she said. "We have nothing. If the police were to ask me to show them my documents, I have nothing. And all the Italian embassy can tell us is to wait." "Who is going to pay for all the expenses I have incurred over the course of these 14 years?" she asks. "And at the end of it all, I still have to pay the €400 for the new pass- ports." Emails sent on Friday morning to the Italian embassy official who is dealing with her case, remained unanswered by Friday evening. News Italian divorcee 'trapped' in Malta due to two-year wait for passport Woman claims embassy misplaced renewal application a staggering three times Identity Malta not giving Electoral Commissioner regular citizenship updates MATTHEW VELLA THE executive chairman of Iden- tity Malta, the government agency that handles identity management and citizenship applications, has been called to attention to his du- ties by the Electoral Commissioner, whose office is finding it difficult to reconcile voters' lists with the names of naturalised citizens. Electoral Commissioner Joseph Church wrote to Joseph Vella Bon- nici that Identity Malta, which is also responsible for the Individual Investor Programme that sells Maltese citizenship for €650,000, was not providing his office with monthly lists of registered citizens and naturalised citizens. "It is of utmost importance that such lists are submitted on a regu- lar basis in conformity with provi- sions of the law," Church wrote earlier this week. "The last monthly lists supplied to this office were for August 2014 (registration) and for December 2014 (natu- ralisation). According to the elec- toral law, Identity Malta is responsible to forward the Electoral Commis- sion with a list contain- ing the name, surname and ID number of any person granted citizen- ship within the first five days of each month. The Electoral Com- mission is already in hot water for having accepted applica- tions for the issuing of voting docu- ments to naturalised citizens who acquired their passport through the IIP: most of these applicants have never spent six months resi- dent in Malta, as required by the electoral law. That automatically excludes them from having a vot- ing document. The Maltese courts rebuked the Commission for rendering consti- tutional requisites "useless" when it disregarded any verification of the applications by IIP citizens to vote. In the first decision a court has taken on one of 91 disputed IIP beneficiaries who were placed on the electoral register, the court re- voked the right of Aleksandr Ole- govich Zaikin to vote. The PN has filed 91 cases against the Electoral Commission, in order to delete new citizens who acquired their passports under the IIP. The PN discovered that the individuals were added to the electoral register without having spent a minimum of six months in Malta over the past 18 months before the publication of the register. It appears that representa- tives for the IIP citizens have ticked 'yes' when asked wheth- er they are 'aged over 16 and always have been a resident of Malta'. But the Electoral Commis- sion has failed to verify wheth- er they even satisfy residence requirements to be able to vote. The Maltese Citizenship Act, amended since the introduction of the IIP, no longer binds the gov- ernment to publish the names of all naturalised citizens every three months in the Government Ga- zette. That important clause, which guaranteed some form of transpar- ency on citizenship, was plainly ex- punged by a new clause setting up the regulator of the IIP. Instead a legal notice setting down the rules for the IIP says the minister has to publish an annual list of all those granted Maltese citizenship by registration or natu- ralization, including those persons who were granted Maltese citizen- ship under the programme. Anonymity for IIP applicants was an important condition laid down by citizenship concessionaires Henley & Partners, something that was vigorously opposed by the Opposition. When government amended the citizenship laws in 2013, it totally removed the clause that mandated the publication of naturalised citizens; replacing it with the clause appointing a regu- lator, who compiles an annual re- port on the IIP without including any personal data of applicants. Adding insult to injury, the gov- ernment's first list of citizens pub- lished after the IIP was launched listed the names in alphabetical or- der, and not the surnames, making it difficult to fish out specific names and families who applied for the IIP citizenship.