The Maltese Falcon, or: my Porsche for a Passport! 35 n­ aturalisation on grounds of national interest. These provisions exist in 22 out of the 28 EU Member States. Such discretionary naturalisation is the prerogative of the state and it is used only in a few cases annually. In several countries, including Austria, discretionary naturalisation has resulted in corruption and secret deals, which tells us that too much discretion can have adverse effects on citizenship. Even with this in mind, we can find some support for Armstrong’s argument that investor citizenship programmes are not always wrong. That is, well-conceptualised ‘golden residence’ schemes may bring economic benefits to the state while also turning investors into genuine stakeholders. However, such ‘golden residence’ programmes should not be based merely on real estate purchase, as recently approved by Spain, and they should require more than a compulsory residence of only a few weeks per year as a mechanism of eventually qualifying for citizenship, as they do in Portugal. The argument here is that neither the possession of real estate nor the lack of residence can help the wealthy to establish a true connection with the destination country. Only ‘golden residence’ programmes that are based on multi-annual investment, jobs for citizens of the destination country, and compulsory residence for the investor before qualifying for citizenship, as is the case in Canada, help the investor to become integrated and interested in the well-being of the citizens of her or his adopted country. By contrast, the program recently passed by the Maltese government is a ‘pure investor citizenship’ scheme, which differs from programmes in other EU countries that have recently adopted various ‘golden residence’ schemes (Bulgaria, Hungary, Portugal, Spain). Besides the crisis-struck Cyprus, which in May 2013 opened several routes to naturalisation on grounds of economic contribution to the state, Malta is the only other European state with such a scheme. The programmes in Malta and Cyprus are thus more similar to the ones in the Caribbean islands – Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Commonwealth of Dominica, and Antigua and Barbuda, all of which operate ‘investor citizenship’ schemes. Two things make the Cypriot and Maltese programmes more attractive for investors than those of the Caribbean islands. First, in the former cases the naturalised investor will be granted visa-free travel to 151 (Cyprus) or 163 (Malta) states. This is considerably more than they would have by virtue of possessing the best-ranked Caribbean passport, that of Saint Kitts and Nevis which allows visa-free entry to 131 countries. Second, and more importantly, since in the EU the regulation of citizenship is decided by each Member State for herself, an individual may now obtain EU citizenship for roughly the price of a Porsche 918 Spyder. Hence the investor gains access