European governments have been accused of opening the door to criminals through lax sales of passports and visas to the super-rich.
The European Union had gained nearly 100,000 new residents and 6,000 new citizens in the last decade through poorly managed residency and passport sale schemes that were “shrouded in secrecy”, a report by Transparency International and Global Witness says.
The campaign groups studied four EU member states that sell passports and 12 that offer residency rights to foreign investors. Spain, Hungary, Latvia, Portugal and the UK have granted the most “golden visas” to investors and their families. But some of the EU’s smallest countries, Cyprus and Malta, earned the biggest sums relative to the size of their economies.
The UK is considering restrictions on its “tier one investor visa” in an effort to curtail the influence of the Kremlin. Applications have already fallen since 2015, when candidates were asked to provide more information about their wealth.
In Hungary, a scheme allowing residency in exchange for a €300,000 investment in government bonds was stopped earlier this year.
“These schemes must have the highest standards of due diligence checks, so that countries know who they are welcoming in and where their money came from,” said Naomi Hirst, senior campaigner at Global Witness. “Unfortunately, that is not what we are seeing. This approach exposes countries to corrupt individuals, and risks the corruption of the state itself as profit-hungry governments disregard the dangers and enter into a race to the bottom.”
The spokeswoman from Global Witness, expressing alarm at the risk of ‘golden passports’ exposing countries to corrupt individuals, indicates a level of naivete akin to a five year old. That is the whole idea of these pay to play schemes. The criminal fraternity and their apparatchiks (bought and paid for governments) sanction such schemes in order to facilitate their fellow criminals free movement around the world, together with their ill-gotten gains; providing unfettered access to a world playground for the wealthy criminal elite at the expense of the exploited and subjugated mass of ordinary people. I think it’s called capitalism.
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