“‘EU Lawlessness Law’”: Investment Migration People in the News This Week

Investment migration people in the news this week included:

• Patricia Casaburi of Global Citizen Solutions
• Dominic Volek and Christian H Kaelin of Henley and Partners
• Mona Shah of Mona Shah & Partners Global
• Bettino Zanini of FiO Legal
• Pedro Lino of Optimize Investment Partners
• Tejo Ventures
• Peter Luo
• Arran Hunt of McVeagh Fleming
• Harris Gu of Queen City Law
• Murat Coskun of Get Golden Visa
• Odisseas Athanasiou of LAMDA Development
• Denis Kravchenko of Astons
• Dr. Martijn van den Brink
• Dr. Dimitry Kochenov
• Simon Cox
• David Lesperance of Lesperance & Associates

Forbes – As Malta Golden Passport Likely Ends, Demand For Golden Visa Rises

However, companies such as Global Citizen Solutions, an investment migration consultancy firm, expect Malta to uphold the program’s conditions for applications in process. Patricia Casaburi, its CEO, adds that “applicants who submitted their files prior to the ruling did so under a valid legal framework.”

[…]

Its Group Head of Private Clients, Dominic Volek, adds that demand from high-net-worth individuals is growing rapidly, “driven by persistent geopolitical uncertainty, rising fiscal pressures in key markets, and a sharpened focus on legacy planning and family security.” Its most extensive client base is North American families.

[…]

The company fully expects more to begin or expand because it believes it is a win-win situation; host nations have a vital injection of capital and talent, and offer stability and opportunity for applicants. The U.S., Canada, UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand are all expanding opportunities, and in that sense, Volek believes the EU is “pulling up the drawbridge when they can least afford to do so.”

The Economist – Trump wants a certain kind of immigrant: the uber-rich

Even so, the forecast of 1m sales looks as misjudged as a fur stole on a sweaty night at Mar-a-Lago. The immigration-investment industry’s rule of thumb is that clients should not tie up more than a tenth of their net worth in an investor visa. That means gold-card applicants would need to be sitting on at least $50m. There are only about 100,000 such high-fliers around the world and most are already in the land of the free, says Dominic Volek of Henley & Partners, an adviser to the footloose ultra-rich. To find the optimal visa price Mr Trump could run an auction; so far he has given no indication that he will.

[…]

Industry insiders report that it is actually Americans clamouring for other countries’ visas. This may pick up if Mr Trump tanks the economy, says Mona Shah, a British lawyer in New York. “I’m feeling it as well,” she sighs. “I still miss Europe.” As it happens, an EU passport courtesy of Malta goes for around €1m ($1.1m).

Fortune – Golden visa brokers advise clients to hurry after Malta ruling

“I think the message is clear: whoever moves sooner will be in a better position,” said Bettino Zanini, an immigration lawyer at Lisbon-based FiO Legal.

[…]

“I don’t think Portugal’s golden visa program is at risk,” said Pedro Lino, chief executive officer of Optimize Investment Partners, a Lisbon-based firm that allows foreigners to qualify for golden visas through providing them with investment opportunities that start at €500,000. “But we’re also advising our clients to hurry up because there may be some changes to the current rules.”

[…]

In a statement on its website, Tejo Ventures, a Portuguese investment fund for golden visas, called the EU decision “a clear warning to similar schemes across Europe.” While residency-by-investment programs likely won’t disappear anytime soon, “increased scrutiny from Brussels is inevitable,” it said.

RNZ – ‘Golden visa’ shutting out Chinese investors, legal experts say

However, licensed immigration advisor Peter Luo said interest from China quickly dried up after the government explicitly excluded the QDII programme from the upgraded “golden visa”.

[…]

“I have quite a number of clients who wanted to apply, but they can’t anymore,” Luo said. “Some have signed a contract with us, but we had to pause the process.”

[…]

Immigration lawyer Arran Hunt said the exclusion of the QDII pathway meant the Active Investor Plus visa was “shut off from almost all Chinese investors”.

[…]

Harris Gu, an immigration lawyer who is also policy chair of the New Zealand Association for Migration and Investment, said the exclusion of QDII from the investor visa settings was unreasonable because immigration laws did not explicitly forbid it.

The Hustle – The economics of golden visas

In 2022, the program received 4.4k applications and nearly double that amount, 8.5k in 2023, according to Murat Coskun, Managing Partner at Get Golden Visa. In 2024, applications reached nearly 9.3k.

[…]

“We call it ‘zip code: paradise,’” says Odisseas Athanasiou, CEO of LAMDA Development, which is developing Ellinikon. 

[…]

But Coskun emphasizes that these changes are not a retreat but a strategic shift. “Greece has not phased out the golden visa program but rather taken a smart approach to balancing investments,” he says. 

Arabian Business – Revealed: Turkish wealthy eye Dubai Golden visas amid rising political, social unrest

“Political and social unrest is one of the biggest driving factors behind the growing interest in Golden Visa programmes,” said Denis Kravchenko, Business Development Director and Head of Astons Cyprus. “We’re seeing the same pattern we saw in the US after Trump’s second election win, wealthy individuals are looking to diversify assets and secure stability for their families.”

The Times – Does the EU’s ruling against Malta spell the end for golden visa schemes?

Christian H Kaelin writes on op-ed for The Times discussing the ECJ ruling. 

While this ruling may close off one specific avenue to citizenship, it will do little to curb the growing international demand for greater mobility, security and access.

[…]

What the judgment does reveal is a troubling turn in Europe’s legal and political culture. The court disregarded the core arguments made by the Commission as well as the carefully reasoned opinion of its own Advocate General, who concluded that the European Commission had no case.

[…]

If Britain wants to remain a global hub for capital, innovation and entrepreneurship, it must offer a clear and credible route for those wealthy and talented migrants who wish to make the UK their long-term home. In the global race for talent and capital, closing the door does not stop the world from moving forward — it just means you are no longer in the room.

Verfassungsblog – Why bother with legal reasoning?

Dr. Martijn van den Brink writes an analysis for Verfassungsblog.

Why is the fundamental status of EU citizenship violated? For the Court, EU citizenship is the fundamental status because of ‘the scope of the rights attaching to Union citizenship’ and because ‘that status derives automatically from’ nationality (para 92). The Maltese CBI scheme doesn’t violate these rights nor alter EU citizenship’s derivative nature, so the Court’s conclusion simply doesn’t follow from its argument.

[…]

Apologies for the cynicism, but the Court interferes in the domain of nationality in by far the most far-reaching way to date, and all it offers in terms of justification is 11 paragraphs of cryptic reasoning without sound argumentation? Almost every first-year student in law will receive an introduction to principles of legal reasoning, and the importance of sound legal argumentation is emphasised throughout their studies. We likely also tell them that outcome isn’t all that matters. Steve Peers already commented that his students would barely get a pass if he would ‘read this reasoning on an EU law exam’. Should we apply lower standards to the EU’s highest court than we have of our undergraduate students? It is concerning that the Court doesn’t bother with legal reasoning—or worse, that it really cannot see its shortcomings. The quality is nowhere near what one should expect from a ruling of such constitutional magnitude.

[…]

It should worry EU lawyers that EU institutions have in recent years so often circumvented the EU’s constitutional framework when political necessity so required. Yet in the face of unprecedented crises, the position that constitutional law must be prioritised over the common good, solidarity, or security has always struck me as a little too lawyerly. But Commission v Malta was not a case of political necessity but political expediency. If the Court is also willing to ignore constitutional constraints in such case, the constitutional guardrails will just come off. Is this really the right signal in light of the unprecedented constitutional challenges at the national level—that we can bend constitutional law to our will without offering a minimum of legal reasoning.

Verfassungsblog – EU Citizenship’s New Essentialism

Prof. Dr. Dimitry Kochenov writes an analysis for Verfassungsblog.

Make no mistake: the Court hints – for the first time – that EU citizenship bond is not only legal in nature. Citizenship has suddenly become a legal but also some other connection between a person and the state. In other words, the law is not enough to make one a citizen, as any such citizenship might fall short of ‘solidarity and good faith’ test at the EU level (para. 99). This newly-invented extra-legal rule put thousands of Europeans in limbo (see also my detailed analysis in EU Law Live).

[…]

The case is an ultra vires attack against the principle of solidarity. Solidarity at the heart of the Union as a community of values has always been an empowering liberal solidarity. In Commission v. Malta it mutated into the solidarity of essentialist nationalisms against the rights of European citizens. The EU citizenship story is well known and has been rightly hailed as a powerful defence of our rights against thoughtless red-tape and petty nationalisms, read ‘thick identitarian demands’. This defence has never been rooted in thick identities, quite the opposite. In Micheletti, the Court protected an Argentinian with an Italian document from Spanish demands, precisely, to showcase a ‘thick’ Italian identity, which he did not have. Similarly in Zhu and Chen, the Court took the side of a billionaire Irish baby who has never visited Ireland and whose parents were, obviously, Chinese, thus offering EU citizenship protections against thick identity expectations. All this stands apparently reversed, hinting at the solidification of the illiberal European Union.

[…]

The disastrous flop of Opinion 2/13 was among the first cracks in the foundations of this vision: if the Union is ready to use its ‘structure’ to push away our rights in a system where democracy is not on offer and only the law could protect us, how reliable is its promise of values? While the Rule of Law case-law has been fast evolving, the most important lesson from it opened the third stage of EU law in this century: the law at hand can essentially amount to a meticulously articulated evil law, borrowing Anna Lukina’s trope, and the protections we hoped for are structurally sacrificed in the interest of the legal system’s internal needs, what Sarah Ganty and I christened ‘EU Lawlessness Law’. Rather than to tame the powers that be, the law appears to be put at the service political prejudice and is there to whitewash any actions, legal or illegal, in the name of short-term political expediency: from excluding accountability for EU’s crimes against humanity to purging the ECJ of a member regarded unfavorably in some capitals with direct implications for the basic independence of the Court, as Graham Butler observed, following the ugly scandal at Kirchberg. EU lawlessness law is behind mass killings in the Mediterranean, torture at the EU’s Eastern border and a general watering down of EU citizenship and other rights in the Union, inaugurating outrageous legal innovations, such as the presumption of guilt as part of EAW law as Petra Bárd has argued.

Financial Times – Malta’s ‘golden passport’ scheme breaks law, EU’s top court rules

“What’s really interesting is whether other states inside or outside the EU could call into question the citizenship of people holding Maltese or Cypriot passports, on the basis that the citizenship was never valid,” said Simon Cox, a lawyer specialised in EU immigration law, referring to both the Maltese and now-abolished Cypriot programmes.

Euronews – Europe’s top tax breaks for the rich – see how countries compare

“Italy is very popular,” tax and immigration advisor David Lesperance told Euronews Business.

[…]

“When the flat tax was €100,000, one of my clients told me that’s what he paid his accountant every year. You’ve got to remember that, with the lump sum tax, there are no compliance costs for tax planning.”