Vanuatu has revoked the citizenship and passport it granted Andrew Tate, a government spokesman confirmed to Australia’s ABC over the weekend.
Held in a Miami federal detention center, the manosphere influencer is currently fighting extradition to the UK. He denies the charges and, to date, has not been convicted in any jurisdiction.
The decision reverses the position Port Vila settled on in June 2025. At that time, weeks after the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) revealed the grant, the government announced that no further action would be taken because a review had found no fault with Tate’s application.
That review, a spokesman said, determined Tate had been “cleared by Interpol, and the UK” when his file was approved.
Revocation Grounds
The Citizenship Commission publishes three grounds on which it can revoke: that citizenship was granted fraudulently, that it was granted contrary to the Citizenship Act or the Constitution, or that the holder has since failed to comply with the Act’s restrictions.
Post-grant criminal accusations do not appear on that list, and neither do convictions.
Fraud, under the Act itself, is a matter for judges. A person found by a court to have obtained citizenship through false representation, fraud, or concealment of a material fact ceases to be a citizen 30 days after that finding.
At the time of publishing, IMI was unable to confirm whether a Vanuatu court has made such a finding about Tate.
Vanuatu’s government has not specified which ground it relied on in the decision. The Citizenship Act attaches no appeal clause to any of its revocation mechanisms and publishes neither a response window nor a statelessness safeguard.
Glen Craig, managing partner of Pacific Advisory, chaired the commission of inquiry Vanuatu appointed in 2023 to investigate its citizenship machinery.
Speaking to the ABC, he described the government’s room for maneuver as narrow until now: it “could not revoke the citizenship until they had been found guilty or charged,” or until another sufficiently good reason presented itself.
Craig’s said the file should never have been approved. Good character, he told the broadcaster, is the baseline, because “it’s a privilege to have citizenship of another country.”
A Passport Granted as the Handcuffs Closed
Tate’s application was already moving by February 2022, when a UK criminal record check was filed on his behalf. Romanian police first raided his Bucharest compound two months later.
Citizenship came through in December 2022, the same month Romanian authorities detained him on suspicion of rape, human trafficking, and forming an organized criminal group. His passport was issued the following month, while he sat in pretrial custody.
He obtained the status through the Development Support Program (DSP), a citizenship by investment (CBI) route requiring a minimum contribution of US$130,000. NXT Citizen, a licensed local agency, filed the application.
Tate has boasted online of holding “seven passports,” without naming them; Vanuatu’s is now off the list.
A Bucharest court returned the indictment to prosecutors in December 2024 over procedural defects, and the case remains open alongside a second, separate investigation.
Travel restrictions were lifted in February 2025, and the brothers flew to Florida on a private jet.
Britain’s move came this summer. US Marshals arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate in Miami on July 18 on a UK extradition request, after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) filed 38 fresh charges against the pair.
Andrew now faces 42 UK charges, including rape, human trafficking, assault, and offenses relating to indecent images of a child; the brothers face 59 between them and deny all of them.
Where Vanuatu’s Program Stands Now
The DSP was among the donation routes that made Vanuatu the fastest and cheapest of the full citizenship options in the late 2010s, and the most scrutinized.
Citing vetting deficiencies, the EU permanently ended Vanuatu’s Schengen visa waiver in 2024, the first removal of a third country from its visa-free list.
Port Vila has since worked to rebuild the program’s credibility around the Capital Investment Immigration Plan (CIIP), which channels contributions into designated sectors and starts at US$115,000 for a single applicant.
As of publication, the government had not released further details on the decision, and it is not known whether Tate intends to contest it.
