UK Justice Minister Dominic Raab blamed Greek Cypriots for selling EU passports.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Justice Minister Dominic Raab claimed that EU passports are being offered for sale online, giving buyers the right to come to the UK.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Mr Raab said: \u201cThis 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 \u2018free movement\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven this is already happening at scale, imagine how much worse this problem will be after the next wave of EU accessions.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true that Greek Cypriot passports are on sale on the internet. The processing fee offered by the company in question \u2013 Buysell \u2013 is 3,975 euros. That\u2019s just over \u00a33,100.<\/p>\n
There is nothing illegal about this. The citizenship scheme is endorsed by the Greek Cypriot government and offered by a number of different companies.<\/p>\n
Obtaining the passport isn\u2019t as simple as handing over a small amount of cash \u2013 there is also the small matter of the 2.5m euro investment you need to make in the Greek Cypriot side of Cyprus.<\/p>\n
The investment can be in the form of property, shares, bonds or other assets.<\/p>\n
You have to submit your application as part of a group of people, but this appears to be a technicality \u2013 you don\u2019t need to know the others.<\/p>\n
The stake each person invests can be reduced from 2.5m euros to 500,000 euros after three years.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
How many people are likely to go down this road? It\u2019s hard to say, although the size of the initial investment ought to exclude most people.<\/p>\n
Channel 4 News reporter Ciaran Jenkins got in touch with BuySell and asked them how popular the scheme is.<\/p>\n
Sales manager Chris Hadjikyriacou said: \u201cIt\u2019s not like that many people are buying passports. They have to have 2.5m euros to invest here \u2013 you might get what 100 people a year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the ministers are going around with our brochure they are using it as propaganda to scare them to leave the EU, it is nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the potential security risk, he said: \u201cWe\u2019re not getting Iranians and Iraqis and Muslims. The people who are buying are oriental: they\u2019re Chinese, Asian, Korean, not Muslims. They\u2019re not extremists.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are very wealthy people, they\u2019ve got nothing to do with jihad and all this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government of (South part) of Cyprus does a full search on them. They don\u2019t get a passport that easy. There\u2019s no risk involved they don\u2019t get in that easy, they have to have a lot of money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brokers who offer Greek Cypriot citizenship stress that applicants\u2019 names must not appear on lists of people whose property assets have been frozen by the EU.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Perhaps Mr Raab thinks there is something inherently wrong about offering routes to citizenship to foreign nationals in return for investment.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s something many other countries in the world do, including Great Britain.<\/p>\n
In this country you can get a Tier 1 (investor) visa if you invest \u201cin UK government bonds, share capital or loan capital in active and trading UK registered companies\u201d.<\/p>\n
Funnily enough, the minimum investment is almost exactly the same as in South Cyprus: \u00a32m, which is just over 2.5m euros as of today.<\/p>\n
But unlike in the South part of Cyprus, you don\u2019t get full citizenship straight away. After investing \u00a32m, you would have to live in this country for six years before applying.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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