The young man sighs in the armchair and tells me how painful it is to have his hopes and expectations dashed after going through three years of studying, ending up with a degree from a university that turns out to be fake. “I was looking forward to graduation in November. Now I feel so hollow and that November date has become meaningless to me.”
His mother, trying to hold back her tears, says how proud they were that their son was going to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts (Business Administration) from the European University. Her husband is the only income earner in the family and on a modest salary they had to struggle hard to make ends meet and pay Lm3,000 for this degree to the European Institute of Education (EIE) at Ta’ Xbiex who were promoting this degree.
In the past few weeks many young – and not so young – people got in touch with me to share the distressing experience of having their dreams shattered after paying so much money and working hard at their assignments and dissertations to qualify for the diploma, degree and post graduate degree offered by the European University through EIE.
Some have already ‘graduated’ and started earning more money and were promoted as their employers thought they had obtained a recognised MBA.
They are worried that they might lose all that, now that it is clear that their MBA is not an MBA as the course work they did is just over a third of an MBA offered by a serious and reliable accredited University.
To make matters worse, the awarding body – in this case the European University – is not recognized as a university by any serious educational authority in the world, including the Malta Qualification Recognition Information Centre (MQRIC).
A man in his 50s tells me: “I am one of the many mature ex-students who went to EIE in Malta to read for my MBA in Leisure and Tourism, in 2005. When I saw the advertisement in the ‘The Times of Malta’ the details in the advert mentioned that the Institute was “recognised by the Government of Malta, by the Ministry of Education, Malta.”
The MBA was from European University (EU), Switzerland and in the EIE brochure it listed down its accreditations with a number of reputable accredited organizations throughout Europe. In the EIE/EU brochure it also gives details that all the work in the curriculum has been organized in Malta and corrected in Malta under the auspices of the Ministry of Education…”
He tells me that it was a two-year, part-time course. The students met every Saturday including other days to visit businesses and the Stock Exchange as part of the curriculum.
When EIE moved to new premises in Ta` Xbiex the then Minister of Education Dr Louis Galea cut the ribbon and inaugurated it. He smiles cynically: “What other proof did we need that the EIE was a serious and reputable institution, when it had such backing from the top national education authorities?”
The students did not know that the Ta’ Xbiex premises of EIE did not, at the time (or even now) have the required MEPA permits to be given the licence to operate as a tuition centre, let alone as a higher and tertiary educational centre!
All the MBA students passed with flying colours and went to Barcelona for the Graduation at the European University Headquarters. But there the fairy tale ends.
“When I started applying for top jobs where they requested the recognition certificate by MQRIC I was turned down and was told that my MBA is not recognised. This obviously was a total shock. I approached EIE Institute to ask them for an explanation and the Director Antonello Cappitta was rather aggressive. His words were: “I should have checked if it was recognised or not before I started the course.” I did not even think about checking such a high qualification course, having seen in black and white that it was recognised by the Government of Malta and the Ministry of Education.”
15 months ago he wrote to the Education Minister Dolores Cristina, but it led nowhere. Then MQRIC informed him that their inquiry shows that the European University in Switzerland is “neither recognised by the canton where it is situated nor accredited by the Swiss University conference. It had never submitted an application for accreditation.”
The inquiry also resulted that our MBA can only be given a “partial referencing to Level 7 of the Qualifications Framework” which means that it is only one third of an MBA.
He says bitterly: “In other words, our certificate is as good as nothing. The Government and the Ministry of Education, including MQRIC, surely must have known that this course and the European University were not reliable and accredited, yet they allowed EIE (Antonello Cappitta, Joseph Bonnici) to continue fleecing people, knowing that at the end of the day the MBA they taught was useless.
“The course cost me just under Lm6,000. Their course material was practically non-existent. Some books were given to us as photocopies, with many pages missing, print hardly readable and pages upside down.
“I cannot fight these people because they are well connected and have ways of getting out of it. People like me – who starved to provide the fee and spent two years working to the early hours of the day on research and study, while taking the initiative encouraged by the Government to get better qualifications – get robbed instead.
“If I cannot get recognition for my hard earned MBA, then I would like you to please help me get my money back, including damages and compensation. These people should not even be allowed to continue cheating others, while laughing all the way to the bank.”
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“I was looking forward to graduation in November. Now I feel so hollow and that November date has become meaningless to me.” 
