Vanuatu’s Citizenship Office says the Citizenship Commission has not decided to revoke Andrew Tate’s citizenship, and that the evidence on file does not support doing so.
The statement, reported by the Vanuatu Daily Post on Thursday, contradicts an ABC report from the weekend in which an unnamed government spokesman confirmed that Tate’s citizenship and passport had been revoked.
The Commission has been briefed on Tate’s case but “has not made a decision to revoke the grant of citizenship,” the Office said, because its records and the due diligence information it has recently received offer insufficient evidence to support one.
Tate, it announced, remains a Vanuatu citizen.
The matter may not be closed, however. Daniel Agius, managing director of the Vanuatu Investment Migration Bureau, who follows the program closely, told IMI that a formal process concerning Tate’s citizenship is ongoing and that he expects it to be finalized “relatively soon, potentially within the next week.”
IMI has reached out to the Citizenship Office for comment.
What the ABC Reported, and What Followed
ABC Pacific, the Pacific service of Australia’s national public broadcaster, reported the story last weekend on its Pacific Beat program.
Alongside the spokesman’s confirmation, it quoted Glen Craig, who chaired the commission of inquiry Vanuatu appointed in 2023 to examine its citizenship programs, saying Tate should never have been granted citizenship in the first place.
IMI ran the story on Monday. RNZ Pacific, the Pacific news desk of New Zealand’s public broadcaster, followed on Wednesday with further comment from Craig, who described the revocation as a sign of Vanuatu’s maturity and told the broadcaster that ‘the weakness was in the system, not in any one decision,’ since no charges had been laid against Tate when the grant was made.
RNZ has since appended a note to that report directing readers to the Office’s clarification.
What the Citizenship Office Says Now
Tate’s CBI application went through the applicable process and was checked against Interpol, the Vanuatu Financial Intelligence Unit (VFIU), immigration authorities, and other screening mechanisms, according to the Office’s statement.
Nothing available at the time identified an adverse record sufficient to stop it, the statement says. Citizenship was granted on December 15, 2022, two weeks before Romanian authorities detained him in Bucharest.
The Office rejects the suggestion that Vanuatu knowingly naturalized a man whom competent authorities had identified as having a criminal record.
Citizenship decisions, it adds, must rest on verified information available when an application is determined rather than on allegations that emerge years later, and the law distinguishes between an allegation, an investigation, a charge, a conviction, and a court finding that citizenship was obtained by fraud.
The statement names two statutory routes. Section 14(2) of the Citizenship Act, as the Office cites it, provides that a person found by a court to have obtained citizenship through false representation, fraud, or concealment ceases to be a citizen 30 days after that finding.
Part 4 of the Act adds further grounds, the Office says, including section 16, which allows deprivation of a naturalized citizen who has been sentenced to imprisonment for ten years or more.
That second ground does not appear on the Commission’s public revocation page, which lists fraud, a grant contrary to the Act or Constitution, and post-grant non-compliance. It sits in the Act itself.
Where reliable evidence establishes deliberate concealment, fraud, or false representation in the original application, the Office says the matter can be considered under the Act.
Later allegations do not, by themselves, show that the 2022 decision was improperly or knowingly made, it adds.
Two Voices From One Government
The two accounts came from different arms of the same government. Spokesmen speak for the executive, while decisions on revocation rest with the Citizenship Commission under the Act, and the Commission’s public position has been consistent since June 2025.
In June 2025, after the US NGO Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed the grant, government spokesman Kiery Manassah then told the ABC that authorities were looking into it and that “the processes will be in place to revoke his citizenship.”
Commission chairman Charles Maniel told the Daily Post the same week that no revocation could proceed until the allegations were proven in court, and the Office said it would act “without delay” if evidence of a conviction were produced.
Weeks later, Manassah told The Guardian that it would take no further action.
This week repeated the pattern. A spokesman announced a revocation; the Commission says it has not made one.
A Process Still Running
Agius concedes that the messaging has been conflicting, “but I do not think the two reports are necessarily irreconcilable.”
He understands that a process concerning Tate’s citizenship is ongoing and that the formal procedures are being followed. “At this stage, however, the Citizenship Office’s position is that no final decision to revoke his citizenship has yet been completed or formally confirmed,” he said, adding that he expects it to be “finalized relatively soon, potentially within the next week.”
On the ABC report, he said it was “somewhat premature in presenting the revocation as having already occurred, when the formal process had not yet been concluded.”
On the grounds the Office itself cites, a revocation needs either a court finding that the 2022 application concealed a material fact or a sentence of ten years or more.
IMI will report the outcome when the Commission announces it.
