Thanks in large part to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, “golden visas” and “golden passports”—visas and passports granted to wealthy foreign nationals in return for significant investments, regardless of the sources of their wealth—have exploded in popularity over the past year. The market is thriving, thanks to record numbers of applicants, significant spikes in inquiries, and increasingly affordable pricing (jurisdictions such as Latvia now sell these kinds of golden visas for as little as 60,000 euros, just over $70,000).
Accompanying the popularity has been growing awareness in how these kinds of programs open doors to dirty money and illicit finance. Last summer’s so-called Russia Report in the United Kingdom specifically singled out London’s willingness to sell visas and residency to Russian oligarchs, overlooking their links with the Kremlin. Investigators in Malta discovered that the notorious offshore haven continued to shop European Union citizenship to a raft of wealthy Chinese and Saudi nationals, despite ongoing investigations into the program from Brussels. And in Cyprus, citizens gathered to publicly protest the island’s willingness to sell citizenship to money launderers, transnational criminals, and oligarchs linked to post-Soviet dictators—a program at the center of the so-called Cyprus Papers, which pulled back the curtain on the wealthy crooks and criminals racing to the country and into the EU.
