Well, good afternoon everyone, lovely to see all of you here for this seminar on this extremely interesting case of Commissioner Walter.

It is groundbreaking, we use that term a lot. It might not necessarily be groundbreaking in the ways that you would think, but it is

highly significant. Now, the judgment was now a few months ago. This has given a bit of a chance

for things to settle and people would have a chance to draw a breath and perhaps think in a more

nuanced way about the case. For those of you who are not familiar with

the case, just very briefly, because the facts at least are not complicated, a number of member

states have golden visas or golden passports. And to put it crudely, you pay a large sum of

money and that gives you a passport. And that is very good for the individual who is rich.

It's very good for the country to get a shedload of money. Less good for those who are not

rich who are having to go through a length the process of naturalisation, which in the case of

Malta also meant having to learn to speak Maltese.

So it gives a quick route to nationality and of course that's the gateway to citizenship.

And that was the problem in this case.

The problem in this case was that there was objections from the commission.

Now this case is highly significant because we are going through what I might call a constitutional

moment with the EU because you've got a large number of significant constitutional cases.

This one, you've got Commission on Hungary, well, we've got the Advocate General's opinion,

but not the judgment.

Commission and Denmark, which is on the mineral wages where the court did uphold largely

the validity of the directive. And the case on marriage, on recognition of same-sex marriage,

also in this context. So a lot is happening.

And I'm very privileged, unfortunately to have some very good, because I'm just a bit of technology then.

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