London ballroom hosts showcase event for ‘golden passports’
Three PMs attend marketing sales event on how wealthy can snap up citizenship from $100,000
Three prime ministers took to a stage in the ballroom of a five-star London hotel this week offering the world’s wealthiest people “golden passports” and citizenship of their countries in return for hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment or flat “contributions”.
Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of the Caribbean island of St Lucia, told about 300 members of the super-rich elite and their advisers gathered at the Rosewood hotel for “global citizenship conference” that his country’s economic mission was “going after high net-worth individuals and giving them a comfortable place to live”.
He promised that in return for a $100,000 (£78,000) “contribution to the national economic fund” applicants would be granted St Lucian citizenship within three months. With it comes a so-called “golden passport” giving visa-free travel to 145 countries, including the UK, the European Union’s Schengen Area, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Also selling citizenships at the conference were the prime ministers of Albania and Montenegro, a Maltese minister, an ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda, and representatives from Cyprus.
“While we cannot ban these schemes on the EU level due to lack of competence, we want more transparency on how nationality is granted and more co-operation between member states. There should be no weak link in the EU, where people could shop around for the most lenient scheme.”
She previously described the sale of passports as “dangerous”, “problematic” and “unfair”, adding: “Having a lot of money alone shouldn’t give you a free pass to benefit from the EU citizenship… if in one country a dangerous person gets citizenship, he gets citizenship for the whole of Europe. Maybe we all have to renegotiate the whole system.”
The three-day event, which cost £1,500 a ticket, was organized by Henley & Partners, a London-based firm that acts as a matchmaker between the super-rich and countries selling their citizenship. Henley has made tens of millions of dollars in commission from selling citizenship. The trade is legal, and Henley is not accused of any sort of wrongdoing.
Cyprus, which asks for an investment of at least €2m (£1.7m), gave citizenship to Jho Low, the fugitive Malaysian businessman at the center of the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund scandal.
Malta, which is also an EU member state, has sold citizenship to five people charged with criminal offenses overseas. They include Anatoly Hurgin, an Israeli citizen charged by the US and Israeli authorities with fraud, smuggling, and money-laundering.
Hurgin’s cyber-intelligence firm, Ability Inc, has been accused of helping countries spy on and locate targets. Hurgin, a former major in the Israeli Defence Force, boasted to Forbes that: “With just a few million dollars and a phone number, you can snoop on any call or text that phone makes – no matter where you are or where the device is located.”
Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist murdered in 2017, had raised concerns about Hurgin when he first received Maltese citizenship in 2016.
While St Lucia is famed for its white-sand beaches and azure seas, Chastanet said there was no requirement for the country’s rich new citizens to actually live on the island, as long as they paid the money to the St Lucia development fund and bought a home in the country.
“St Lucia is modernizing itself, and going to be making itself competitive on a global basis,” he said. “And it’s looking for new citizens that want to take advantage of what St Lucia has to offer.”
Chastanet, who has served as prime minister of the former British colony since 2016, claimed many of the country’s new citizens were from the US. “When they’re traveling abroad, they don’t want to have a US passport,” he said.
Chastanet was joined on the ballroom stage in the Rosewood hotel, where rooms can cost more than £2,000 a night, by Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania and Duško Marković, the prime minister of Montenegro.
Rama launched Albania’s citizenship-by-investment program at the conference promising a “10-year tax holiday”. He reminded delegates that Albania was an official candidate for accession to the European Union, which would give new Albanian citizens the right to live and work across the bloc.
“I know that there are controversies around this type of program,” Rama said. “At the same time I strongly believe this is the right way, and this is what we have to do …There are, of course, risks but we cannot deny to our country and our future the enormous potential of this program.”
Marković said he was offering 2,000 people Montenegrin citizenship in return for a €100,000 contribution to government coffers, and a property investment of at least €250,000. The Montenegro government said individuals would only be granted citizenship following very thorough security checks.
At the 13th Global Citizenship Conference in London spoke re success of RCBI. The +ve impact on our society: direct revenue, new business, job creation & human capital. Reiterated the importance that every accredited agent upholds the highest ethical standards. @JosephMuscat_JM pic.twitter.com/qvhjwhVQIB
— Julia Farrugia Portelli (@JuliaFarrugia) November 13, 2019
The governments of St Lucia and Albania did not respond to requests for comment.
Henley & Partners did not respond to requests for comment in time of publication. However, it has consistently supported its role in worldwide investment migration, which it has previously said drives industry-diversifying foreign direct investment that creates sustainable growth for countries and opportunity for their people.
