Citizenship on the Cheap and London Real Estate for a Pretty Penny
Hello, and welcome to Oligarchy. We are tracking how Covid-19 and the world’s response to it is affecting the super-rich — and what that means for power and politics.
Golden Passports
Cyprus promised to abolish its Golden Passport scheme, following the excruciating admissions of wrong-doing that Al-Jazeera’s undercover reporter obtained (seriously, watch it, and help the video reach half a million views), but I can’t help doubting that the island actually will. The program, under which Cyprus sells European Union citizenship and keeps all the profits, has made more than €7 billion. And that’s a free money fountain any government might struggle to stop drinking from.
- “The government [has previously] made changes to the scheme only when the pressure was full-on, they didn’t do it on their own volition,” said Eleni Mavrou, a member of Parliament for the opposition AKEL party, who thought the scheme will likely continue largely unchanged. “You must understand that a powerful lobby is pushing for this scheme.”
It now seems that a powerful lobby is pushing back, however, with the European Union launching so-called infringement proceedings against both Malta and Cyprus, home to the two most controversial citizenship-by-investment programs in the EU (Bulgaria and Austria also have laws allowing them to sell passports, but no one talks about them much, probably because Bulgaria’s program is too unsuccessful, and Austria’s is too discrete).
- “This is exactly the kind of decisive action we have been calling for,” said Laure Brillaud, senior anti-money laundering policy officer at Transparency International EU. “There is overwhelming evidence that the golden visa schemes of Cyprus and Malta have been serving corrupt interests, not the common good. For years, the governments of both countries have ignored public outrage. The European Commission’s decision means they could find themselves in the European Court of Justice.”
An infringement proceeding is the legal action taken by the European Union’s central authorities against a member state that violates the union’s treaties. They are, being both an EU instrument and a legal process, extraordinarily complex (see the flow chart on page 12, if you don’t believe me), and this is just the beginning.