10 On The Weekend – Anatoliy Lyetayev: Our Agents Get Paid No Matter What

Ten On The Weekend is a weekly feature on IMI, the concept of which is simple: Each weekend, we ask the same ten questions of a different industry figure, letting readers get to know the interviewee on a more personal and informal level than they might in an ordinary business setting.

This weekend’s guest is Anatoliy Lyetayev of Migronis Citizenship.

How do you spend your weekends?
Most of the time, on Saturdays I work. It’s a great day to work on creative tasks. Nobody can distract me on this day and I can dedicate the whole day to creating content and writing my book. On Sundays, I normally spend time with the family. Sometimes I do kitesurfing if I am lucky with the wind.

What are your top three business goals this year?
Goal number one is identifying new markets for our business. We have been developing IT solutions for the investment migration market for about a year and a half. We have a strong intention to complete them this year and to make it possible to share them with market participants. So this is our goal number two. We have a goal number three but it doesn’t seem to be achievable this year.

What’s your biggest business concern right now?
As for my biggest concern at the moment I would point out the limitations imposed by the pandemic, where our clients postpone decision-making with regards to getting residency or citizenship. Here, we deal with deferred demand.

Which book is on your night-stand right now?
I am a follower of the libertarian philosophy, so now I am re-reading Murray N. Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.

How and when did you first get into the investment migration industry?
I founded Migronis in 2012 to provide business immigration services in the EU at first and then I entered the CBI market later, in 2014. What is the most amazing thing here is that I’ve never met, in real life, the man who originally introduced me to the market. We have been communicating by phone for over six years. His name is Alex Voronov and he is the Development Director for CIS and Eastern Europe of NTL Trust.

What was your proudest moment as a service provider? 
One of the things I am the proudest of in our activities is the way we treat our agents. They are never left without the finder’s fee even if we haven’t received our own remuneration yet. To ensure we can continue with that, we have created a special reserved fund, which enables us to make a rapid refund. That’s why we have more and more agents coming to us, agents who elsewhere have had to wait for their finders fee for quite a long time and especially those who never received their fees at all.

Which investment migration market development has surprised you the most in the last year?
I would point out Grenada as the biggest surprise in the sense that demand for the program there has risen multiple times, a trend triggered by the price increase for the US EB5 visa.

If you could go ten years back in time, what business decision would you change?
Judging from my experience after being in the market for more than seven years, the only thing I would have changed if I could go back 10 years would have been to enter the market much earlier.

What investment migration industry personality do you most admire
There are a few personalities that I’d like to mention in this respect. First of all, Nestor Alfred, the CEO of the Saint Lucia CIU, for his proactive promotion of that program. Although it was the last CIP to appear in the Caribbean, it’s gained momentum very rapidly in the last few years. And, in my opinion, the credit for that goes to Nestor. The other ones are Kamal Shehada and Mohammed Asaria, who managed to construct five-star hotels on a few islands within a rather short period of time. They were new to that region and without any previous experience there and that deserves respect.

If all goes according to plan, what will you be doing five years from now?
I would think that in five years’ time I will dedicate much more time to writing books and maintaining my video blog. I am a great fan of the idea of freedom and self-sovereignty. At present, I am in the middle of writing a book about it and shooting a video blog that is due to be released at the end of summer.