Portugal Considers Closing Golden Visa Program

Portugal Considers Closing Golden Visa Program

Portugal may close its golden visa program, which allows wealthy foreigners to obtain a residence permit in exchange for investment, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa said at a Web Summit in Lisbon, writes the information portal.

Costa noted that the program, launched in Portugal in 2012, supposedly has already completed its task. According to the prime minister, the government is now reviewing the visa programs offered by Portugal, including the "golden visas". According to the prime minister, the official decision will be announced after the completion of the analysis.

Over 10 years, thanks to the "golden visas", Portugal has attracted €6.5 billion in investment from foreigners, mainly from China, Brazil and South Africa. Most of the attracted investments were invested in real estate. This year, Portugal decided to stop issuing residence permits for the purchase of real estate in Lisbon, Porto, the Algarve and the coast in order to redirect investments from large cities to less developed areas. At the same time, Portugal decided to launch the so-called Digital Nomad visa, which allows foreigners with high income and remote work to live and work in the country for a year.

Portugal stopped considering applications for “golden visas” from Russians at the end of February, after the start of the Russian NWO in Ukraine. By that time, Russians had received 431 golden visas since the start of the program, including seven in 2022. Since February, Portugal has received ten applications for these visas from Russians, all of which have been denied.

The European Commission has previously called on EU governments to close programs for the sale of citizenship to investors. In 2020, Cyprus canceled the corresponding program: an investigation showed that more than half of the 3,000 passports issued by Cyprus from 2007 to August 2020 to foreign investors were issued with violations. In March, Bulgaria's parliament adopted amendments to the Citizenship Law, abolishing the "golden passports".

In February 2022, the UK also officially closed the golden visa program, citing the risk of injecting illegally obtained money into the country.