“We Have Heard the Rumors” of New CIPs in the Pacific: The Vanuatu Citizenship Interviews Part 3
In this third installment of a three-part series on citizenship by investment in Vanuatu, Chairman Warsal of the country’s Citizenship Commission and VIMB-principal James Harris discuss the relative competitive position of the Vanuatu DSP:
- How can Vanuatu’s DSP maintain a competitive edge against the Caribbean CIPs? What can Vanuatu’s DSP offer that the Caribbean Five can’t?
- How would Vanuatu’s competitive position be affected by the opening of new CIPs in its own region?
- What developments are taking place with regard to opening additional investment options, notably for real estate?
One notable advantage that the DSP has over Caribbean competitors is that it’s the only program of its type in Asia-Pacific. Beyond that, he notes, “it is generally recognized that Vanuatu has one of the faster, simpler programs to apply through […],” indicating also that these advantages were not unrelated to the program’s due diligence practices.
“We have to find a balance between having sufficient due diligence to make people [outside the country] comfortable and to make Vanuatu comfortable as well […] and, at the same time, enable Vanuatu to maintain that speed of processing and delivery that it enjoys at the moment, which is quite a significant competitive edge.”
Questioned as to how Vanuatu’s competitive position might be affected by the introduction of competing CIPs among neighboring Pacific island states, Chairman Warsal remarked that he was not too concerned about the prospect.
“We’ve heard the rumors of what some of our neighbors are planning but our perspective is that we’ve been running these programs here for the last six or seven years and […] we are constantly aiming to review and make the program better, to enable it to compete on the world stage. So, we are not worried. We think we can do it better [than new entrants].”
Echoing the Chairman’s views, Harris pointed out that any new programs in the region will have a hard time catching up with Vanuatu.
“It’s one thing to have the notion and the idea and the aspiration to launch a program; it’s quite another thing to successfully do it and Vanuatu has accumulated a really long track record of success in operating its program, so it does have a lead.”
Watch the full video below:
Christian Henrik Nesheim is the founder and editor of Investment Migration Insider, the #1 magazine – online or offline – for residency and citizenship by investment. He is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, documentary producer, and writer on the subject of investment migration, whose work is cited in the Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, Newsweek, and Business Insider. Norwegian by birth, Christian has spent the last 16 years in the United States, China, Spain, and Portugal.