Five lawmakers from the Progressives have filed a bill that would strike the €150,000 (approximately US$172,000) fund option from Latvia’s golden visa. Faction chair Andris Šuvajevs heads the signatories, joined by Andris Sprūds, Liene Gātere, Kaspars Briškens, and Jana Simanovska. They submitted bill 1521/Lp14 on September 3, 12 days before the new Immigration Law took effect.
The target is Article 27(1)(36). It grants temporary residence permits of up to five years to foreigners who place at least €150,000 with a state-created alternative investment fund manager for at least five years. Applicants also pay €10,000 (approximately US$11,500) into the state budget.
Nothing in the bill touches the company share-capital route. With the property and bank deposit routes already closed, Latvia would be left with one investment pathway. No transitional provisions accompany the deletion, so the bill says nothing about applications filed before it would take effect.
Sponsors’ case
The bill’s Latvian-language explanatory note objects to granting residence in exchange for “a financial, and in this case very minimal, investment.” It ties the route to “disproportionate and heightened” security, money laundering, sanctions evasion, and reputational risks.
Permits granted “on the basis of investment” depend chiefly on an applicant’s wealth, the sponsors argue, rather than on labor-market needs, security, or integration policy. They also cite a Saeima inquiry committee report approved on May 26, before the fund route existed. Its recommendation was to close the existing investment routes, the company route included.
By the note’s own assessment, the bill’s economic impact is positive, since lawmakers adopted the route without “sufficient and data-based justification” of its “real economic contribution.” Nor does the note foresee any budget loss, because no payments under the route have reached the state budget. In practice, the route may not be usable yet.
Pledge and referral
Lawmakers re-passed the law with the fund route intact on August 20. Šuvajevs then told the LETA news agency that his party would push again in September to halt the golden visa program entirely. Young people and families in Latvia would suffer from it, he argued.
During the August 20 debate, Sprūds, a former defense minister, told the chamber that “we are generally against selling golden visas,” according to public broadcaster LSM. He warned that “it is a security threat.”
On September 10, the Saeima sent the bill to the Defence, Internal Affairs and Corruption Prevention Committee. Its chair, Raimonds Bergmanis, belongs to the United List, the party of Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs, who first proposed the fund route as a lawmaker.
“It is important to note that bills take time to pass all the reading stages in the Saeima,” cautions Viktorija Tomaševiča, a lawyer at EU Law Firm.
For bill 1521/Lp14, referral to committee is “one of the first steps of its legislative journey,” she explains. “Elections are set to take place on October 3, and we will wait for them to happen before we formulate any more opinions on the matter,” Tomaševiča adds.
