The European Commission is going to legalize the abolition of the visa-free regime for countries with available citizenship by investment programs

What has happened? The European Commission has made several proposals that would make citizenship by investment programs a basis for suspending the visa-free regime in the Schengen area.

What about now? In its current form, certain conditions should be met before the mechanism for suspending the third country visa-free agreement with the EU:

• a significant increase (more than 50%) in the number of persons arriving illegally from visa-free countries, including persons staying illegally and those who were denied entry at the border;
• a significant increase (more than 50%) in the number of asylum applications from countries with a low level of recognition (about 3-4%);
• decreased cooperation on readmission;
• increased risk to the security of EU Member States.

The main changes. The European Commission proposes to strengthen the visa-suspension mechanism and expand the grounds for a suspension to include conditions such as “insufficient compliance of the country with the EU visa policy, hybrid threats and the operation of citizenship by investment schemes.”

In other words, the organization is seeking a mandate to abolish visa-free access for countries that operate “golden passport” investment schemes.

Examples. Among the problems identified in the European Commission report was that Caribbean countries allow investors of the citizenship programs to change their names after naturalization. The commission also questioned the high approval rates in the Caribbean's "golden passport" programs.

Quote. “Based on information received from the competent authorities, the Commission has concluded that all investment schemes assessed have a large number of successful applicants, with a total of at least 88,000 passports issued to date. For certain countries this number is above 30,000 (34,500 passports issued by Dominica, 36,742 passports issued by St. Kitts and Nevis). At the same time, the rejection rate is extremely low (between 3% and 6%), which, together with the  short processing times (as little as two months in some cases), raises questions about the thoroughness of security screening,” the European Commission report says.

Source: Investment Migration Insider

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