The UK Guardian has highlighted the inconvenient truth lurking within Portugal’s Golden Visa regime.
While it has worked miracles for the economy – not to mention key areas of the property sector – it has also seen a rush of dodgy characters “buy access to Europe” via the Portuguese government.
In a story released yesterday, the left-wing daily cites “business executives implicated in a Brazilian corruption scandal and relatives of an Angolan politician who has been accused of bribery”.
Portugal isn’t alone in its Golden Visa ‘list of shame’, adds the Guardian. Cyprus too is cited for nodding through “Russian oligarchs and Syrian businessmen”, all in the name of bumper cash investment.
But what the paper hasn’t explained is how one Portuguese politician is on a mission to plug the holes in her country’s ‘golden visa’ programme.
Euro MP Ana Gomes has been a vociferous opponent of the scheme – championed by former deputy prime minister Paulo Portas – since its inception.
She told the BBC back in 2014 that it potentially opened the doors to “all sorts of corrupt even criminal organisations… and it might be another very dangerous avenue to import additional corruption and criminality into the EU”.
As Gomes’ predictions are now being appreciated, the European Commission has decided to analyse all regimes “in the next few months”, and issue a report, “either this year or in 2018”, writes weekly paper Sol, stressing that Gomes has previously tried to introduce an amendment to golden visa legislation that would force authorities to properly check applicants’ honesty/ reputations/ good standing, but that this change, to date, has not been accepted.
