Malta’s agency says citizenship by merit is not a citizenship-by-investment programme

Aġenzija Komunità Malta, the agency responsible for implementing Malta’s citizenship legislation, published a notice on 5 February 2026 stating that Malta Citizenship by Merit “is neither a programme nor a scheme, pathway, continuation, or alternative” to the country’s former citizenship-by-investment framework. The same notice says the agency “does not permit any marketing or promotion of this legislation”. It gives as its reason that the agency had become aware of social-media posts and other communications portraying the subject inaccurately.

What the notice adds

What the notice adds is that the body administering the law has described, in public and in its own words, what the thing being discussed is not.

The sequence behind it is a matter of record. On 29 April 2025 the Court of Justice of the European Union gave judgment in Case C-181/23, Commission v Malta (Citoyenneté par investissement). The judgment carries ECLI:EU:C:2025:283 and was published in the Official Journal on 6 June 2025. The acts the Court referred to were Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Article 4 of the Treaty on European Union. The agency’s notice says the former citizenship-by-investment framework “was repealed following” that judgment.

The Maltese Citizenship Act, Chapter 188, remains in force, and has been since 21 September 1964. Its consolidated text was published on 24 July 2025, and Act XXI of 2025 is listed among the Acts related to it, alongside Act XV of 2020 and Act XXXVIII of 2020. What those Acts provide, and when, is not established here.

What the notice actually says

Four of the notice’s statements bear directly on how the thing may be described.

• Marketing or promotion of the legislation is not permitted by the agency.
• Citizenship by merit is not a programme, scheme, pathway, continuation or alternative to the repealed framework.
• The pre-existing legislation, which the agency identifies as Subsidiary Legislation 188.04 of 2017, was “publicly revisited through transparent statutory processes”.
• Decisions on granting citizenship by merit are discretionary, and applications are assessed “strictly and diligently on a case-by-case basis”.

The notice gives no eligibility criteria, no procedure, no financial requirement and no processing time, and it says decisions are discretionary and taken case by case.

Who is affected

Anyone who has been shown Malta Citizenship by Merit as a route.

The agency says it became aware of social-media posts and other communications that inaccurately portray it, and that it does not permit marketing or promotion of the legislation. It does not name any firm, platform or post, and neither does this article.

What the notice does not settle is what that prohibition rests on. Whether it is a licence condition binding agents, a statutory prohibition, or a statement of the agency’s own policy is not stated, and the difference decides who is exposed if it is breached.

What the notice does not settle

The notice is short. It gives no figure, no processing time, no eligibility criteria and no procedure. It does not cite the CJEU case number or link to the judgment. It does not say what the revisiting of the 2017 subsidiary legislation produced, or when. It names no sanction for breaching the marketing prohibition.

Where the legislation is, and is not

The notice points readers towards Subsidiary Legislation 188.04 of 2017 as the pre-existing law.

Checked on 18 September 2026, that identifier does not resolve on Malta’s consolidated legislation site: eli/sl/188.04 returns “No legislation has been found”. Nor does any other subsidiary instrument in the series — 188.01, 188.02, 188.03, 188.05 and 188.06 each return the same. The negative was tested before it was written. Two subsidiary instruments under other chapters, eli/sl/123.127/eng and eli/sl/460.32/eng, resolved on the same path; the six Chapter 188 identifiers returned the quoted message. The parent Act at eli/cap/188/eng and Act XXI of 2025 also resolve, but by different paths. What is recorded is non-retrieval through the URLs tested.

That is a statement about what one government site returns on one day, and nothing more. Subsidiary legislation may be published elsewhere, and a consolidation site need not carry every series. Nothing here establishes that the instrument was revoked, that it never existed, or that the agency’s description of it is inaccurate.

What to watch next

What the statutory revisiting produced, and where any resulting instrument can be located. Whether the agency says what its marketing prohibition binds, and with what consequence.

On the agency’s own record, three things stand: Malta Citizenship by Merit is not described by the authority as a programme, scheme, pathway, continuation or alternative to the repealed framework; decisions are discretionary and assessed case by case; and the agency says it does not permit marketing or promotion of the legislation. What that prohibition binds, and what follows from breaching it, the notice does not say.