Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/697149
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 26 JUNE 2016 6 News MATTHEW VELLA AND JURGEN BALZAN IN a dingy part of Qawra's urban core, an enclave of holiday flats on J. Quintinus street overlooks the last part of undeveloped fields in the centre of the northern locality. The road ends here, in a carpark outside six blocks of cut-price holiday flats and low-rent residential apartments – there is nothing here that could attract the prospects of the world's global rich. And yet, on the second floor of Tema Flats, there should be the apartment that Victoria Shopina would have acquired as a prereq- uisite to become a Maltese citizen for €650,000. That property re- quirement should have cost her €350,000, and it surely cannot be rented for the minimum €16,000 laid down in the rules of Malta's in- dividual investor programme (IIP). But there's nobody in apartment number five of Tema Flats. The doorbell is not even marked with Shopina's name. Nobody answers the door. Like hundreds of the world's glob- al rich who are flocking to Maltese financial intermediaries to secure themselves a passport to the EU, most of Malta's 'IIP citizens' may not even be living here. The controversial programme was said to have been green-lit to the European Commission, which first rebuked Malta for selling EU citizenship so blithely for €650,000, after introducing a 12-month resi- dential requirement, backed by a €350,000 property acquisition and a further €150,000 in stocks. But it is clear that not every mil- lionaire who has been granted a Maltese passport is even abiding by these requirements. Even to the untrained eye, the Naxxar maisonette on Triq il- Forga that should be hosting Liu Zhongtian, is easily recognisable as a letterbox address that is used by Zhongtian's people in Malta to col- lect official mail. Because Zhongtian is a Chinese billionaire estimated by Forbes to be worth at least $2.8 billion, a for- tune made in aluminium produc- tion for the automotive industry. Even more worryingly, as the Na- tionalist Party's electoral observers recently discovered, is that Zhong- tian became the recipient of a vot- ing document without even fulfill- ing the constitutional requirements of having lived for six months in Malta within the last 18 months: because the Electoral Commission has not been verifying contradic- tory claims made by IIP applicants' intermediaries, which in some dec- larations say their clients have been in Malta since the age of 16. Again in Naxxar, on St Paul's Street, the De Lellis building, a two-floor apartment building that houses a commercial outlet and the offices of Prestige Capital Management, is supposed to be the residence of four new citizens: Majdolin Al-Dawood, Omar Yusuf M. Fathi Khalaf, Fathi Khalaf, and Yusuf Khalaf. But if you exclude the villa area on one side of St Paul's Street, this is hardly a property zone for €350,000 apartments. In Qawra, Russian entrepreneur Vjacheslav Solvyev picked one of the holiday apartments on Triq l-Is- tamnar behind the Seacrest Hotel in Qawra. On Bonavita Street just be- low the Sacred Heart convent in St Julian's, a second-floor apartment should be the house of Russia's Brit- ish American Tobacco distributor Oleg Smirnov and his wife; while an apartment in Zejtun should be the residence of another high net worth individual, Aleksandr Zaikin. The Gamzalov family lives in a first-floor apartment on Birzebbuga's Triq tal- Gebel: the patriarch is a director of the Russian metallurgy giant Zavod Metallokonstruktsy and the owner of OW Capital Management, an Austrian investment firm. But these properties are far from high-end luxury addresses that can hit the €350,000 mark. In some cases, the profile of the IIP citizen in Malta could not be more stereotypical: a high net worth individual who needs both tax se- crecy and visa-free travel. Take one Grigor Khachaturov. He lives with his wife and two children in a Santa Marija estate villa by the Mellieha coast. According to the Panama Papers, he set up a British Virgin Is- lands offshore company back on 20 September, 2012 through Chetcuti Cauchi. The timing suggests Kha- chaturov has long been a resident in Malta, well before the introduction of the IIP. A good deal of IIP citizens are 'housed' in top-tier property areas: the US multi-millionaire William Erbey, who built mortgage loan giant Ocwen Financial, lives in a Forth Mansions apartment in Ta' Xbiex. Erbey could be about to face a US securities lawsuit after he was forced to resign the chairmanships of his mortgage companies over ir- regular conflicts of interest. Typical addresses include Fort Cambridge and Tigné Point, as well as seafront addresses on the Tigné seafront, Spinola Road in St Julian's, Pendergardens in St Julian's, Tas- Sellum in Mellieha, and the Cham- bray complex in Gozo. Search for Chambray's latest resident, Rui Ming John Long, for example, and the first reference one finds on a Google search is the name inside the Offshore Leaks da- tabase released by the ICIJ. Another neighbour would be Marwan Al Bawardi, a banker, also one of the beneficiaries of the Maltese golden passport. Andrey Epifanov, vice president of Moscow giant International Potash, which produces fertiliser for much of the former Soviet states and Chi- na, has a Pendergardens address. And Russian businessman Dmitry Yurievcih Doykhen – owner of the Sportmaster retail chain and re- cently mooted in an €11 million de- velopment of a Hampton by Hilton hotel in Voronezh – would be living in a Mensija, San Gwann terraced house. But some others seem to have chosen less high-end addresses, like the Vashkevich family, which has a Depiro Point apartment on Depiro Street, Sliema; and just round the corner, in the Belmonte Heights complex, live Lilianna Demirchyan and Svetland Hovakimya. Electoral Commission rebuked by courts Earlier this week, the executive chairman of Identity Malta, the government agency that handles identity management and citizen- ship applications, was called to at- tention to his duties by the Electoral Commissioner, whose office is find- ing it difficult to reconcile voters' lists with the names of naturalised citizens. Electoral Commissioner Joseph Church wrote to Joseph Vella Bon- nici saying that Identity Malta, which is responsible for the Individ- ual Investor Programme, was not providing his office with monthly lists of registered citizens and natu- ralised citizens. "It is of utmost importance that such lists are submitted on a regular basis in conformity with provisions of the law," Church wrote earlier this week. "The last monthly lists supplied to this office were for Au- gust 2014 (registration) and for De- cember 2014 (naturalisation). Justice minister Owen Bonnici said the matter has since been re- solved. Identity Malta is responsible to forward the Electoral Commission In Malta since 1956 SUMMER OFFERS 21 st June to Santa Maria FREE GIFT WITH YOUR CANDY PURCHASE www.vdemajo.com.mt 137, Antoine De Paule Square, Paola. Tel: 21 66 11 22 Not all IIP applicants are buying This St Julian's block should be housing an IIP millionaire who runs Russia's distributor for British American Tobacco: is it really worth €350,000 or €16,000 in annual rent? Forth Mansions Xbiex: this is American multi-millionaire William Erbey, giant Ocwen Fort Chambray a more fitting acquisition for citizens who passports for