Where is the cheapest place to buy citizenship?

 By Kim Gittleson

BBC reporter, New York

It is a cliche used from Bond to Bourne: the classic spy image of a suitcase filled with cash and multiple passports for a quick getaway. But increasingly it is not spies that are looking for a second passport, but a growing number of "economic citizens".

Henley and Partners citizenship expert Christian Kalin, who helps to advise clients on the best place to spend their money, estimates that every year, several thousand people spend a collective $2bn (£1.2bn; 1.5bn euros) to add a second, or even third, passport to their collection.

"Just like you diversify an investment portfolio, you want to diversify your passport portfolio," he says. The option has proven popular with Chinese and Russian citizens, as well as those from the Middle East.

Cash-strapped countries have taken notice. In the past year alone, new programmes have been introduced in Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain that either allow direct citizenship by investment or offer routes to citizenship for wealthy investors.

However, concerns have been raised about transparency and accountability.

In January, Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission, said in a speech: "Citizenship must not be up for sale."

But for now, at least, it seems that those with money to spare are in luck, with half a dozen countries offering a direct citizenship-by-investment route with no residency requirements.

Essentially, citizenship that is very much for sale.

Dominica

By far the cheapest deal for citizenship is on the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica.

For an investment of $100,000 plus various fees, as well as an in-person interview on the island, citizenship can be bought.

However, experts caution that because the interview committee meets only once a month, actually getting a Dominican passport can take anywhere from five to 14 months.

Since Dominica is a Commonwealth nation, citizens get special privileges in the UK, and citizens can also travel to 50 countries, including Switzerland, without a visa.

Dominica country profile

St Kitts and Nevis

The Caribbean islands of St Kitts and Nevis have the longest running citizenship-by-investment programme (CIP) in the world, which was founded in 1984.

There are two methods to obtain citizenship, with the cheapest option being a $250,000 non-refundable donation to the St Kitts and Nevis Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation, a public charity. A second option involves a minimum $400,000 investment in real estate in the country.

The programme has recently been singled out by the US Treasury, which cautioned that Iranian nationals could be obtaining passports and then use them to travel to the US or make investments, which could violate US sanctions. (St Kitts closed its programme to Iranians in December 2011.)

However, Mr Kalin of Henley and Partners, which helped to set up the programme, says that while the programme has its issues, "St Kitts is relatively well run - it's in a way a model."

He adds that Caribbean locations are good for interim passports for "global citizens" who are looking to eventually establish themselves via investments in other "economic citizenship" programmes like those in Portugal or Singapore.

St Kitts and Nevis profile

Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda introduced its CIP in late 2013, with similar parameters to the St Kitts model: a $400,000 real estate investment or a $200,000 donation to a charity.

In a speech announcing the programme, Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer cited a common reason that countries have increasingly introduced CIPs: an economic slowdown and "the virtual disappearance of traditional funding sources".

He cited both the St Kitts example as well as the United States, which allows foreigners to obtain a green card under the EB-5 visa if they invest $500,000 in a "targeted employment area" and create 10 jobs. (Since 1990, foreigners have invested more than $6.8bn and the US has given out 29,000 visas through the EB-5 programme, although there is a yearly cap of 10,000.)

However, Mr Spencer also said: "The Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment Programme is not an open-sesame for all and sundry."

Antigua and Barbuda profile

Malta

"Citizenship-by-investment programmes are certainly on the rise, especially in Europe," says University of Toronto law professor Ayelet Shachar.

The tiny nation of Malta recently came under fire when it announced plans to allow wealthy foreigners to obtain a passport for a 650,000 euro investment with no residency requirement, which would have made it the cheapest European Union (EU) nation in which to purchase citizenship.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat estimated about 45 people would apply in the first year, resulting in 30m euros (£24m; $41m) in revenues.

After pressure from EU officials, officials changed the rule to require potential passport holders to reside in Malta for a year and raised the investment to 1.15m euros.

The uproar exposed rising tensions over the definition of citizenship, according to Prof Shacher.

"At stake is the most important and sensitive decision that any political community faces: how to define who belongs, or ought to belong, within its circle of members," she says.

"The heft of the applicant's wallet is the new answer, according to citizenship by investment programmes. This is in breach of our standard naturalisation and citizenship requirements that focus on establishing a genuine link between the individual and the new home country."

Malta country profile

Cyprus

Cyprus is the other EU nation to offer a direct citizenship-by-investment route.

The cost of the programme was slashed to 2m euros in March, partially in an effort to placate mostly Russian investors who lost money when Cyprus was forced to accept a strict European Union bailout.

(The 2m euro figure applies when one invests as part of a larger group whose collective investments total more than 12.5m euros; an investment of 5m euros in real estate or banks is still required for an individual.)

But Mr Kalin cautions against a Cypriot investment, noting that the programme initially cost 28m euros, then 10m euros, then 5m euros.

"It's a good example of how not to do it - you bring a product to market and totally misprice it and it gets cheaper every six months. It is ridiculous," he says.

Cyprus country profile

The future and AAP

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu

One of the most magical moments of this election, the moment when people saw politics once again as an act of faith and hope, was the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party. The story of AAP is not just its story, it is the story of these people reinventing politics and themselves

I want to begin with a story. Last night, I received a phone call from a friend of mine. She told me that she was on a truck heading for the Kolar Gold Fields to campaign for a friend who had joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). She hinted that AAP there spoke a different dialect from AAP in Bangalore or Varanasi.

AAP, she claimed, was a collection of dialects, a set of murmurings, whispers and silences. She did not use the word voice claiming that social scientists had wrecked the meaning of voice, divorcing it from speech. AAP, she claimed could be an amplifier of murmurings, little fragments of protest scattered across the landscape. Her candidate, Ramiah would not get the attention that a Nandan Nilekani commands but it is precisely why the former is important. AAP, she and others claim, is not a taproot like the Congress, or the CPI(M) or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); it is like a rhizome ready to spring anywhere and connect to anything. In an organisational sense, AAP is not a hierarchical party, with a centralised voice. In recreating the idea of empowerment as an enabling exercise, AAP has to continue to be inventive. Murmurings were her label for the new politics. She referred to it as the politics of humility because it captures the power of small protests. Empowerment, she said, begins with the marginal, or the forgotten; it has to entice the music of politics out of the silences of our time. Politics takes storytelling to realms beyond the formal by translating the “murmurings” of our age, the still inarticulate protests of our time. The beauty of AAP is that it is full of surprises. It realises that the conscience of politics will come from these people.

I realise my friend was right. One of the most magical moments of this election was the rise of AAP. I am not referring to Mr. Kejriwal only but the AAP effect, that magical moment when people saw politics once again as an act of faith and hope. Thousands of people including students, retired professionals, journalists and housewives saw in AAP a new phenomenon which renewed their faith in citizenship. In fact, the story of AAP is not just AAP’s story, it is the story of these people reinventing politics and themselves. AAP may not win many seats but it is an exemplary exercise. It will continue to reinvent itself long after this election is over. It is a chrysalis for the future.

This essay asks itself what the directions in which an AAP can create new worlds and possibilities could be.

Incompleteness of citizenship

In reworking politics, it questions old classifications. It realises that citizenship is not a fully hatched word like a large ostrich egg. It is a growth, a promise, a hypothesis which has to be tested. Citizenship is not a guarantee of entitlements but a promissory note. What AAP has to emphasise is the incompleteness of citizenship. It is the recognition of the fact that the refugee, the scavenger, the nomad, the subsistence farmer, the pastoral group, the fisherman and others in the informal economy constitute over 70 per cent of India and lack rights or even a temporary claim to citizenship. To reinvent democracy, AAP has to retain the mnemonic of the informal. In challenging the temporariness of citizenship, AAP creates a durability, a competence around the fragility of the informal threatened by clerks, police and goons. Empowerment is a way of going beyond these obstacles to rework cities, offices, hospitals, villages and technologies.

Learning from Gandhi

The history of AAP begins with the politics of body because the body is the real site for politics. In claiming the body as a vehicle of being and protest, students discover the violence of the state and vulnerability of their bodies facing water cannons, stones or lathi charges. The body gives politics an immediacy which fine-tunes protest. It is a site for struggle. The body also prevents politics from straying into the abstractions of ideology or policy. It is a statement of presence, of sensing politics and suffering as part of a sensorium of sounds, smells, touch, taste and memory. In this world, poverty can never be a statistic, but a way of experiencing the world. Poverty can never be reduced to Rs.32 a day when it is lived through the body. The body keeps politics concrete, tangible, and personal and creates a space for ethics. This much the AAP generation learnt from Gandhiji.

An experiment in politics as truth begins with the body. It is the tuning fork for understanding poverty, well-being, torture, communication and time. It gives politics the depth of everydayness as it understands pain, joy or stigma. When Mr. Kejriwal was stoned and slapped repeatedly he realised that there were other messages beyond coercion. When he communes with Gandhiji at Rajghat, he articulates a new strength and vulnerability that is profound by moving. Language then becomes critical because language is not mere text but speech and dialect. AAP realises the world of manifesto as text comes alive in speech, in orality, in gossip and rumour as the nukhad and mohalla embrace and debate an idea. Because language is playful, politics can be playful, allowing for humour, ambiguity, translation. In being playful with language, AAP can liberate politics from its pomposity, its ideological heaviness, and the hypocritical impasses it has got into. AAP has to return magic to old tired words like secularism, development, security, participation, and nation state. It is more open to mistakes as it is constantly rereads its own politics. It creates a new language of error which liberates it from pomposity. What makes AAP refreshing is the ease with which it owns up to mistakes. AAP has a more relaxed view of its role in history so it can see the comedy of politics.

An experimental party

The politics of AAP cannot be an act of storytelling in linear time as history and most U.N. and World Bank reports are. The obscenity of development is that it has no sense of defeated or obsolescent time. One needs a plurality of time to dream of diversity. Tribal time, body time, peasant time, displaced time of refugee, the obsolescent time of a craftsmen need space, voice and articulation. They cannot be confined to indifference. The nation state seeks to create a uniformity of time while AAP politics should seek to pluralise time. One cannot think of an ethics of memory or an ethics of sustainability without it. In this sense, AAP is creating a link between the ethical and the political, pointing out to the lost times in each word. History eats up myth, development destroys nomadic time, and innovation hides obsolescence. Forces like globalisation only understand speed and instantaneity. AAP, by creating a commons of time, allows for memories, silence, new tales of suffering, and new kinds of ecology. AAP in that sense is not a specific timetable but an act of storytelling, which unfolds terms of its own rhythms. This variety of time allows for little experiments all over India. Instead of a million mutinies, AAP becomes the politics of a million inventions, many of which are life sustaining. Democracy without that diversity of experiments in technology and livelihood is doomed.

Finally, AAP is experimental. As a result, it is not inflexibly tied to any ideology or any charter of the future. AAP wants politics to be full of surprises. In that sense, it is not a planned rocket but a wager. It does not need the mass leader in a fascist sense but insists that citizenship, when it is no longer passive, is a form of leadership. It takes problem-solving in a modest way realising that solutions to work are contextual and local. AAP requires a million exemplars to sustain itself as a paradigm. In doing this, it breaks the fossilisation of democracy as a fetish of rights, elections and governance. It is the democratisation of democracy that makes AAP the party of the future. I think this is why we have to look at AAP differently, expect more but expect the less predictable from it. This is what makes it the party of the future and a party with a future.

(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.)

Will Pakistan become a Taliban State?

Interview with Arshad Mahmood

Malta selling EU passports to foreign investors for £546,000

Want to buy citizenship? It helps if you're one of the super-rich

Malta has announced it is selling passports to foreign investors for £546,000, but that's cheap compared with other countries, such as Britain and the US

A foreign investor looking to get a passport for an EU country would be better off looking at Malta's citizenship deal. Photograph: Alamy

Citizenship is like rhythm: if you weren't born with it, it's not easy to get. However, in the EU there is a fast-track for the super-rich. The Maltese government now has a scheme to attract "high-value" foreigners to the country, by selling passports for £546,000. Which, by passport standards, is pretty cheap.

The move has ruffled feathers in the UK. In part, because of worries about unchecked immigration; the passport grants its holders full EU citizenship, including freedom of movement (Maltese citizenship also come with a visa waiver on entry to the US). Labour's shadow immigration minister, David Hanson, told the Financial Times the move risked being "a backdoor route" to EU residence and was "not a tight or appropriate immigration policy". The government faces calls from British and European politicians to intervene and put a stop to the plan.

But the main reason the UK is annoyed is not because we worry foreign millionaires will come here to claim benefits. It is probably that Malta's scheme is more attractive than our own deal for super-rich settlers. The British equivalent, the Tier 1 (Investor) visa programme, assesses applicants on the basis of their ability "to invest £1,000,000 in the UK". Foreign investors who hold £10m of their money here can apply for permanent residence after two years living in the country. Compared to Malta's plan, it looks like a load of hassle.

About 20 countries operate similar systems. In the US, Immigrant Investor Visas are awarded to foreign nationals who invest $1m in the economy and create 10 full-time jobs for US citizens within two years of arrival. Those who do so are awarded permanent residence and, after three more years, can apply for full citizenship. In the Canadian province of Quebec, "Immigrant Investors" must invest $800,000 CAN (£457,000) in an interest-free, five-year bond and show at least two years of proven management experience. (Canada suspended its nationwide immigrant investor programme in July 2012 but Quebec's continues.)

The European schemes tend to be more lenient. Greece, Cyprus and Macedonia offer fast-track resident permits for foreign investors who spend a minimum of €250,000 to €400,000 (£210,000 to £335,000) in the country. Spain grants a residency visa to foreign buyers who spend €500,000 (£418,000) or more on Spanish property, though the wait for permanent residency and EU citizenship is five years.

The major beneficiaries of such schemes are the Chinese global rich. Since October last yea, 318 residence permits have been issued in Portugal to foreign property buyers who spent over €500,000. Of these, 248 went to Chinese nationals; 15 went to Russians, and nine each to Angolans and Brazilians.

The Maltese system may be the most open of the lot: its applicants do not need to be resident in the country, and are not expected to prove any further investment in the islands' economy. It is expected to attract around 40 people in its first year, rising to 300 a year from 2014.

But their stay may be short-lived. Polls show 53% of Maltese oppose the move, and the opposition leader, Simon Busutil of the Nationalist Party, has pledged to revoke the passports if returned to power. In fairness to him, it won't be hard to expel citizens who have never actually lived there in the first place.

£1m buys foreign investors right to live in Britain

Foreign millionaires are flocking to use a little-known immigration scheme that allows wealthy individuals to jump to the top of the queue for permanent residency.

The most recent figures from the Home Office show that more than 400 people applied to use the investor visa scheme in the 12 months to the end of June. This compares with a total of 331 people in 2011 and fewer than 200 in 2009. Photo: PA

By Harry Wilson

9:30PM BST 06 Oct 2012

Rich Russians and Chinese are increasingly using "investor visas" that allow wealthy foreigners to effectively buy the right to live in the UK in return for buying at least £1m of gilts or shares and bonds in British companies.

Top London private bankers have expressed concerns at the number of people using the scheme to gain permanent resident status, arguing that the authorities should consider raising the amount of money needed to gain residency.

"The £1m threshold was put in place more than 20 years ago and is not the obstacle it once was. We have seen a huge increase in demand from Russians, Chinese and people from the Middle East wanting to move to London and it is clear that given the unlimited demand the time may have come to charge more for entry," said on senior London banker.

The most recent figures from the Home Office show that more than 400 people applied to use the investor visa scheme in the 12 months to the end of June. This compares with a total of 331 people in 2011 and fewer than 200 in 2009.

Mark Pihlens, chief executive of Invest UK, which advises wealthy foreigners on investing in Britain, said political instability in the Middle East as well as China and Russia had driven the spike. "People want to take out a second option on where they and their children can live," he said. 2012

Wealthy foreign nationals can speed up the process by investing greater amounts. Investments of more than £5m and £10m mean permanent residency could be gained within as little as two years.

Why can anyone shovel cash into the UK without any enquiry into its provenance?

Mary Dejevsky in the Independent.

Today is the day when English justice delivers its verdict on the oligarchs. After seven months spent poring over the evidence, Mrs Justice Gloster returns to London's Commercial Court to hand down her judgment in the case of Berezovsky v Abramovich – Boris Berezovsky being a one-time Kremlin adviser now in exile in Britain; Roman Abramovich being the owner of Chelsea Football Club. Berezovsky claimed Abramovich cheated him in a share deal, and demanded £3bn in damages. Abramovich said he did nothing of the kind.

The huge sums of money, the intricacy of the arguments, and the ever-shifting political context in which the disputed events took place, all make this a landmark case. But there will be many Britons, myself shamefacedly included, who have already given up and pronounced a plague on both their houses. Whoever wins – and having sat in the courtroom a couple of days, I admit to flailing hopelessly in the rights and wrongs of it – here are two men of a certain age and uncertain wealth seeking to settle old scores through the British courts. Which of them emerges victorious troubles me very little.

It may be that one can afford to lose more than the other, and I would hazard who that might be. But each exploited the turmoil of immediate post-Soviet Russia to his own – considerable – advantage. Acumen came into it, but so – I suspect – did bluff, acquired street wisdom and not a little chance. Whether one behaved honourably and one less so, I would hesitate to wager, but the likelihood is of at least 50 shades of grey.

Corruption was endemic in the Soviet Union; it is endemic in Russia today. In between, there was corruption plus chaos. The times were brutal, and I almost doubt that it is worth raking over old coals in any court at all. Let any aggrieved oligarchs fight it out, in the old-fashioned way, and let the cannier, more ruthless man win. If there is blood on the floor, or the doors, or the car bumper, so be it.

The trouble is that Berezovsky v Abramovich, and the parade of other oligarchs resorting to the London courts, says something not just about a very particular period in Russia (which is now gone), but also about Britain today. And I do care about that, as should the UK Government and the country at large. If Russians cannot get it together to run an honest state, then that reflects at least in part their state of development and their chequered history.

It is no good for us to try to impose our civic standards on them, as various do-gooding NGOs have long tried to do. If there is no domestic power or consensus to sustain change, no improvement will last. A quorum of Russians has to demand a less corrupt state, and there are signs – in recent protests and the rise of internet exposés – that they will.

No doubt that is why Berezovsky and his compatriots have petitioned the English courts to rule on events that have only the most tangential connection with this country – a meeting here, a hotel room there. In a way, that shows a flattering confidence in British justice and a distressing lack of faith in Russia's own. But has the arrival of so much Russian money in Britain, with high-profile members of its privilegentsia not far behind, really been an untrammelled good, or even neutral in its effects?

Someone who believes it has a downside is Alexei Navalny, the frontman for Russia's populist anti-corruption campaign. He has speculated that, while much of the Russian money oiling the wheels of London society is honestly acquired, some of it – obviously – is not. And he asked the question that we Britons should have been asking for a decade or more. Why is it so easy for someone with no obvious ties to Britain to set up shop here and shovel in the cash without any enquiries being made into its provenance? The image of a Russian paying for a Mayfair flat with a suitcase of cash became almost a cliché of the late 1990s. But why did we laugh it off, rather than ask how that could be acceptable or even legal?

Navalny notes that all a rich, or even modestly well-off, Russian had to do – if he chose not to invest £2m in a business to acquire a resident's visa – was to buy a flat, produce his ID and a utility bill, and lo he could set up a bank account and start transferring his billions. In his book, the process was too easy. In my book, as a Briton, opening and operating a bank account and transferring money across borders is too difficult. The very same procedures – the address, the ID, the utility bill – that make it so simple for a foreigner to import his ill-gotten gains cause endless hassles for us natives. Plus the UK bank must declare to the taxman outgoing transfers above a certain amount – but not those coming in.

You can only laugh really about error-prone ID checks that cause us untold delays in the name of preventing money-laundering, yet give foreign shysters a fast-track to legitimacy – so long, that is, that any actual fraud has not been committed here. As HSBC's admitted involvement in Mexican drug money-laundering showed, you have to be a big fish not to get caught in the anti-corruption safety net of a British bank.

It is not just Russians, of course, who feed dirty money into Britain. But it is their millions that have had some of the most obviously pernicious consequences. At the less harmful end are those flats paid for in cash and all the "bling"; at the opposite extreme are some mysterious killings and attempted killings. In between is the court time taken up by internal Russian squabbles – how many homegrown cases have to wait? – and the damaging effect on diplomatic relations of the UK's generous political asylum policy towards economic, if not criminal, exiles.

It might be said that every country gets the emigrés it deserves. In being more interested in the money than how it was acquired, we have brought many of these difficulties upon ourselves. But they are not ours alone. We can fulminate against corruption in Russia as we like, but unless the UK does more to stop dubious Russian money coming to London, we need to recognise that our own greed and regulatory laxness have also played their part.