4 Reasons Citizenship by Investment Isn’t a Security Threat to the EU
Opinion of the editor
The European Commissioner for Justice, Vera Jourova, has called citizenship by investment programs (
#1 – No citizen’s background is scrutinized as thoroughly as those participating in a CIP
Obtaining a citizenship by way of investment entails subjecting yourself to an exhaustive list of measures designed specifically to weed out individuals who have, have had, and may in the future have nefarious intent or criminal proclivities.
The documentation an applicant must hand over includes (but is certainly not limited to):
- Proving the source of your funds and wealth
- Providing several professional references
- Providing proof of address
- Providing police records from everywhere you’ve lived
- Providing bank statements
- Providing tax receipts
- Providing signed affidavits
In addition, most of the above needs to be notarized and/or apostilled.
Watch: Saint Kitts CIU-Boss’ Walks Us Through His Due Diligence Process Step by Step
Once a client has undergone the rigmarole of procuring the
But it doesn’t stop there, of course.
As if this weren’t enough, all your information (possibly including adverse information uncovered during the aforementioned procedures) passes by the desks of local and international law enforcement such as police and
Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to get into the EU by paying some Lithuanian undergraduate 20,000 for her hand in a pro forma marriage?
#2 – There are many easier and cheaper ways for dangerous people to get into the EU
Beyond suddenly finding love on a Vilnius university campus, plenty of other routes to the EU are more feasible than going through a CIP:
You could overstay your tourist visa, or be a stowaway on a cargo vessel, for example.
More than a million undocumented immigrants entered Europe in 2015 and while, I’m sure, many were honest people with good intentions, we know that quite a few of them were not. I’ll go out on a limb and say they probably weren’t subjected to four-tier due diligence upon arrival at 4 AM on some beach in Sicily, and they didn’t have to shell out a million euros either.
994,800 individuals obtained citizenship in an EU-country in 2016. Of those, fewer than 0.1% came via CIPs.
“The granting of citizenship poses a serious security risk because it gives beneficiaries all the rights of EU citizens and allows them to move freely throughout the Union,” Jourova told Germany’s Die Welt in August. If that’s the case, wouldn’t it be more pragmatic to devote the grave concern and media attention to the 99.9% who became EU citizens by routes other than CIPs?
I’m not saying all CIP-participants are good people; there are lugubrious characters in their midst, no doubt. But at least we spend months vetting and building a file on them. CIP-applicants are probably the category of immigrant least likely to cause trouble and – if they end up doing so anyway- the easiest to find.
#3 – Citizenships can be – and have been – revoked post hoc.
Even if individuals of questionable background and intent do manage to get through the needle’s eye of CIP due diligence, the issuing state can still deprive the individual of his or her citizenship at a later time, if the individual in question’s transgression is disconcerting enough to warrant it.
This week, Finnish law enforcement arrested a Russian national holding a Maltese passport (whether he obtained it through the MIIP remains unconfirmed, but it appears likely) on suspicion of involvement in a money-laundering operation.
Under Malta’s Citizenship Act, the Prime Minister may revoke the citizenship of naturalized individuals if they receive a jail sentence of 12 months or more within seven years of becoming Maltese. If the man in question is convicted and sentenced to more than a year in prison, Malta’s government will likely strip him of his citizenship.
Saint Lucia, another example, recently revoked the citizenships of six individuals
#4 – It is in the interest of CIP-countries themselves to keep out
CIP-countries run significant risks by naturalizing new citizens of all types, whether through marriage, years of physical residence, or CIPs (although the risk is considerably lower for those naturalized through CIPs, as explained above) because there’s no telling how those individuals will comport themselves in the future.
Read also: EU to Use “All Legal and Psychological Tools” to Force CIP-Country Compliance With New Guidelines
They may be clean as whistles now but could end up bringing shame, or inconvenience, or economic problems to their new home country. The damaging acts of a single individual may, for instance, cause all his compatriots to lose their visa-privileges, end up on a travel-ban list, become subject to trade sanctions and so on.
CIP-countries really don’t want to naturalize the wrong people; too much is at stake and the countries in question are perfectly happy to miss out on the tens of millions of euros a year in investments they would otherwise have received from crooks because the alternative is far more costly.
The EU’s Penchant for Tilting at Windmills
Due diligence and thorough background checks on applicants are integral to the proper functioning and risk-management of citizenship by investment programs. But the European Commission’s devoting disproportionate amounts of media coverage and time to the class of immigrants that is both the least numerous and the least likely to be delinquent is a frivolous – albeit media-friendly – pursuit of largely imagined boogeymen.
Christian Henrik Nesheim
Editor, Investment Migration Insider
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.