Title: Investor Schemes "Golden Passports" and "Golden Visas"
Author, co-author: Sommarribas, Adolfo
Abstract: For the last 10 years, the EU Member States have been developing schemes to attract wealthy third-country national investors. To this end, Member States have facilitated the granting of visas or residence permits and even implemented fast-track procedures for the acquisition of citizenship. The Commission’s report identified the following areas of concern: 1) Security: checks run on applicants are not sufficiently robust and the EU’s own centralised information systems, such as the Schengen Information System (SIS), are not being used as systematically as they should be; 2) Money laundering: enhanced checks (‘due diligence’) are necessary to ensure that rules on anti-money laundering are not circumvented; 3) Tax evasion: monitoring and reporting is necessary to make sure that individuals do not take advantage of these schemes to benefit from privileged tax rules; 4) Transparency and information: the report finds a lack of clear information on how the schemes are run, including on the number of applications received, granted or rejected and the origins of the applicants; and 5) In addition, Member States do not (routinely) exchange information on applicants for such schemes, nor do they inform each other of rejected applicants.
Author, co-author: Sommarribas, Adolfo
Abstract: For the last 10 years, the EU Member States have been developing schemes to attract wealthy third-country national investors. To this end, Member States have facilitated the granting of visas or residence permits and even implemented fast-track procedures for the acquisition of citizenship. The Commission’s report identified the following areas of concern: 1) Security: checks run on applicants are not sufficiently robust and the EU’s own centralised information systems, such as the Schengen Information System (SIS), are not being used as systematically as they should be; 2) Money laundering: enhanced checks (‘due diligence’) are necessary to ensure that rules on anti-money laundering are not circumvented; 3) Tax evasion: monitoring and reporting is necessary to make sure that individuals do not take advantage of these schemes to benefit from privileged tax rules; 4) Transparency and information: the report finds a lack of clear information on how the schemes are run, including on the number of applications received, granted or rejected and the origins of the applicants; and 5) In addition, Member States do not (routinely) exchange information on applicants for such schemes, nor do they inform each other of rejected applicants.