Entering Malta — UK Exporter Edition. A practical preview for UK exporters considering Malta — a market genuinely transformed in the past year by explosive services growth, reflecting Malta's role as a European hub for iGaming, financial services and ship registration — one of 101 markets in the Copernicus Trade Guide Library.

The point below is additional to the full guide's own analysis of Malta's services boom and yacht registration business — it covers the EU court ruling against Malta's golden passport scheme, a genuine setback to one strand of Malta's services economy not addressed there.

Beyond the iGaming, financial services and ship registration strengths described in the full guide, one strand of Malta's business-services economy has now been formally closed. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled on 29 April 2025 (Case C-181/23) that Malta's 'golden passport' citizenship-by-investment scheme breached EU law — the court found that selling citizenship in direct exchange for predetermined payments undermines core EU citizenship principles. Malta responded by repealing the scheme through national legislation (Act XXI of 2025, gazetted 24 July 2025), effectively ending the last such programme in the EU; applications submitted before closure remain in an unresolved, on-hold status pending official guidance. The scheme had generated over €1.4bn for Malta's public finances since 2015.

For UK professional services firms — particularly legal, immigration advisory and wealth management businesses — that had built Malta-linked service lines around this programme, this represents a genuine, material change: those revenue streams have now closed by law, not merely by court order, though Malta's Permanent Residence Programme remains available as a more limited, EU-compliant alternative, alongside a new discretionary 'citizenship by merit' route under the same 2025 legislation. This is a useful balancing point against the otherwise uniformly positive services growth story described elsewhere in this guide.