Foreign investment citizenship

 Wealthy Russians are increasingly acquiring a second citizenship or residence permit: it allows to travel around the world without limits and also to save on taxes by choosing countries with the loyal tax regimes. The most profitable and comfortable way to get citizenship of some countries is to buy real estate or to make investments there.

 Cyprus is still one of the most attractive countries for Russians; in 2018 according to Knight Frank, the number of applications for the real estate’s purchase to get citizenship increased by 40%. There is nothing strange: it takes only 6 months to get a passport and it’s not necessary to stay in the country during a long period of time. You can visit 156 (133) countries without a visa or with a visa on arrival, and required sum of investments is from 2 million euros – it’s not so much. The high popularity of investment citizenship made Cyprus authority worried about the situation and from January 31, 2020, conditions for getting Cyprus citizenship would be tougher –there are a lot of reasons to hurry up.

 Another interesting option is the second citizenship in the Caribbean, for example, St. Kitts and Nevis, billionaires Pavel Durov and August Meyer are the most famous passport’s owners of this country. Here you can find even more acceptable conditions – sum of investments from 150 thousand dollars in the charity fee form or sum of investments from 400 thousand dollars to buy real estate there. The passport will be ready in 4 months, there is no need to live in St.Kitts and Nevis permanently and you can visit 134 (126) countries without a visa.

 If you want to have the UK investment citizenship, it will take a lot of efforts, time and money. To get citizenship in 6 years you need to invest at least 2 million pounds. If you are ready to invest more than 5 million pounds, it will be possible to get British citizenship in 5 years. You should permanently stay in the country during these 5-6 years and you have only 450 days totally for travelling out of the Great Britain. But after all these efforts you can visit 163 (more than 170) countries without a visa and being a tax non-resident to avoid a rigid progressive tax scale. To sum it all up we need to say that the UK was popular for Russian investors in the 90s, today the situation has already changed. The UK isn’t so attractive because of Russian ruble’s crushing and due to the need of confirmation the source of the investments.