“Greek Cypriots selling EU Passport”

UK Justice Minister Dominic Raab blamed Greek Cypriots for selling EU passports.

Raab gave a speech at the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign headquarters in Westminster on June 8, 2016 in London, England. Mr Raab was joined by Justice Secretary Michael Gove as they made a case for Britain leaving the European Union on the basis of increased border control and security. Britain will go to the polls in a referendum on the 23rd of June on whether or not to leave the European Union.

Justice Minister Dominic Raab claimed that EU passports are being offered for sale online, giving buyers the right to come to the UK.

He brandished an advert from a Greek Cypriot estate agent apparently offering a Greek Cypriot passport in three months for just under 4,000 euros.

Mr Raab said: “This shows open, flagrant selling of EU passports. Once people buy these EU passports and with it citizenship of an EU member state, they have the automatic right to come to the UK because of ‘free movement’.

“Given this is already happening at scale, imagine how much worse this problem will be after the next wave of EU accessions.”

It’s true that Greek Cypriot passports are on sale on the internet. The processing fee offered by the company in question – Buysell – is 3,975 euros. That’s just over £3,100.

There is nothing illegal about this. The citizenship scheme is endorsed by the Greek Cypriot government and offered by a number of different companies.

Obtaining the passport isn’t as simple as handing over a small amount of cash – there is also the small matter of the 2.5m euro investment you need to make in the Greek Cypriot side of Cyprus.

The investment can be in the form of property, shares, bonds or other assets.

You have to submit your application as part of a group of people, but this appears to be a technicality – you don’t need to know the others.

The stake each person invests can be reduced from 2.5m euros to 500,000 euros after three years.

It’s true that once you have the passport, you get the right to live and work anywhere in the EU, including Britain, under free movement rules.

How many people are likely to go down this road? It’s hard to say, although the size of the initial investment ought to exclude most people.

Channel 4 News reporter Ciaran Jenkins got in touch with BuySell and asked them how popular the scheme is.

Sales manager Chris Hadjikyriacou said: “It’s not like that many people are buying passports. They have to have 2.5m euros to invest here – you might get what 100 people a year.

“It’s not like a large amount of people are going to come getting this. These 100 people are not going to affect you guys there. You get truckloads of people trying to cross the channel, thousands of people every day cheating. So somebody coming to buy in the Greek part of Cyprus, they are staying in the South part of Cyprus.”

“If the ministers are going around with our brochure they are using it as propaganda to scare them to leave the EU, it is nonsense.”

On the potential security risk, he said: “We’re not getting Iranians and Iraqis and Muslims. The people who are buying are oriental: they’re Chinese, Asian, Korean, not Muslims. They’re not extremists.

“These are very wealthy people, they’ve got nothing to do with jihad and all this stuff.”

“The government of (South part) of Cyprus does a full search on them. They don’t get a passport that easy. There’s no risk involved they don’t get in that easy, they have to have a lot of money.”

Brokers who offer Greek Cypriot citizenship stress that applicants’ names must not appear on lists of people whose property assets have been frozen by the EU.

The number of times this detail is mentioned on various websites gives us a clue as to who might be interested in using this service: Russians, as Mr Raab acknowledged in his speech.

Greek Cypriot side has long been a favourite offshore banking centre for rich Russians, and the country relaxed its citizenship rules to appease angry Russians who lost savings after the EU and IMF bailed the South part of Cyprus out in 2013.

Perhaps Mr Raab thinks there is something inherently wrong about offering routes to citizenship to foreign nationals in return for investment.

But it’s something many other countries in the world do, including Great Britain.

In this country you can get a Tier 1 (investor) visa if you invest “in UK government bonds, share capital or loan capital in active and trading UK registered companies”.

Funnily enough, the minimum investment is almost exactly the same as in South Cyprus: £2m, which is just over 2.5m euros as of today.

But unlike in the South part of Cyprus, you don’t get full citizenship straight away. After investing £2m, you would have to live in this country for six years before applying.

If you want to settle in Britain, you can only spend 180 days a year abroad, but there is no residence requirement in the South part of Cyprus.

In fact, the Greek part of Cyprus currently offers one of the easiest, cheapest and speediest routes to an EU passport on the market (and it is a market).

Spain, Malta, Bulgaria, Portugal, Greece, Austria and others all offer citizenship to wealthy investors, but in most cases the stake is higher and the wait much longer than three months.

It is fair to say that the Greek part of Cyprus offers an easier route to full citizenship for rich investors than most countries. As far as we know, no one else will give you a passport in three months.

At the same time, Biden congratulated the Turkish Prime Minister on assuming his leadership role and underscored the importance of the U.S. -Turkey partnership.