Cyprus deprives 222 people of “golden passports”
The Cypriot government has revoked the citizenship of 222 wealthy investors and their family members as part of an effort to restore the reputation tarnished by the investment-for-passport program, which investigations revealed had illegally granted citizenship in hundreds of cases. About this, as he writesEuropean truth”, reports AP.
Cypriot government deputy spokesman Niovi Parisinu said the figure included 63 investors and 159 of their relatives, including spouses, children and parents.
In its 13 years of existence, the once lucrative, now defunct program has repeatedly violated its own rules and granted Cypriot passports to investors who did not meet the criteria for citizenship. Some of them committed criminal and other offenses by becoming citizens of this Mediterranean island state.
A spate of corruption allegations began following a 2020 TV report that allegedly showed a parliamentary speaker and a powerful lawmaker claiming they could circumvent the rules and grant citizenship to a fictitious Chinese investor allegedly convicted of fraud in his country.
The Cypriot government strongly denies any corruption but acknowledges “mistakes, loopholes and omissions” in the way the program has been implemented. The embarrassment caused by the spread of information about the program to other members of the European Union led the government to abandon it.
The passport program brought in more than 9 billion euros for the country as it recovered from the 2013 financial crisis that pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy and led to the closure of its second-largest bank.
The program proved particularly attractive to foreign investors, as obtaining an EU passport gave them access to the entire bloc. Hundreds of passports were issued to wealthy Russians.
An independent commission investigating the program found that it worked “with gaps and omissions, without a legal framework and almost without a regulatory framework“.
Cyprus deprives 222 people of “golden passports”
The four-member commission said that more than half of the 6,779 passports issued could have been illegally issued to dependents of investors or top executives of companies because there were no laws to allow such cases. A third of the remaining passports were issued to investors who did not meet all the necessary criteria.
