Citizenship by Investment & Plan B Backup option case study #9

Jennifer: It's Jennifer Harding Marlin coming to you from beautiful Norway. I'm here for a little while before heading to Budapest representing St. Kitts and Nevis at the World Championships in swimming. And so here is video number nine of a series of 10 videos to talk about why we recommend a particular citizenship program to a client based on their fact situation. So this is a client they wanted to live in Europe. And so the only sort of European Citizenship by Investment program that's currently operating and is one of the best is the Malta Citizenship by Investment program. You have really high level visa free with Malta which includes Canada and the United States of America so if having access to these countries is important visa free then this is one of the options and so with Malta Citizenship Program it takes them about 18 months to do.

Jennifer: You do have the requirement of having to go and spend time in Malta as part of the process for doing citizenship.

Jennifer: It makes it easier and it's good to have a footing on the ground in Malta as part of the process. But ultimately with the Malta Citizenship by Investment Program, why we recommended it to them is because they wanted to live full-time in Europe and have the option of residing and potentially working in Malta and other European countries. And so this gives them sort of a more wider range of options in terms of travel and in terms of business and in terms of opportunities. And this couple, they could also include future children and or children in their Malte citizenship application. So this is something else for people that have families or other family members that wanted to include lots of family members and lots of citizenship programs. We've seen, while this person wasn't our client at the time, Eric Schmitz of Google.

Jennifer: So he did the Cyprus Citizenship by Investment program at the time that the Cyprus Citizenship by Investment program was operating.

Jennifer: which it eventually closed down due to international pressure as well as not doing sufficient background due diligence checks on certain applicants. With Malta Citizenship Program, there's discussions about eventually phasing out the Malta Citizenship Program and there's a lot of pressure to end the program. So we've seen a lot more people that are interested in doing Malta or really, you know, that have done a Caribbean Citizenship Program but they also want another even stronger passport which is more expensive. It's over 2 million, sorry, over a million euros to do the Malta citizenship program. So it's definitely more costly than the Caribbean, but you do have the right to live and work in certain European countries, you have a higher level of visa-free travel, and it can open more doors. So that is why for them we recommended the Malta citizenship program. They also were not able to get any citizenship through descent.

Jennifer: So they were not able to, through their family lineage, get European citizenship. So that's something that you could always look into and sometimes we look into clients if they're able to get citizenship via another means and not just by Citizenship by Investment. So that's an example, this is an example of a client where we recommended the Malta Citizenship by Investment program and help them with the process. All the best, bye for now.