The European Parliament is set to approve on Wednesday a report urging the EU to ban golden passport schemes by 2025 and immediately stop the issuance of visas and passports to rich Russians in exchange for investments.
The move follows Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which has triggered global sanctions of unprecedented severity against Moscow, with targets including a number of powerful and wealthy Russians seen as close to President Vladimir Putin.
The golden passport industry, which between 2011 and 2019 generated investments in EU countries of over 20 billion euros ($21.8 billion), is currently almost entirely unregulated in the EU, despite many countries having run these schemes for years.
EU states such as Malta and Cyprus have made huge profits with their schemes and the European Commission’s vice president overseeing financial policy, Valdis Dombrovskis, set up a successful residence investment programme in Latvia when he was prime minister there at the beginning of the last decade.
