May 29th, 2023 at 12:12 am
JUST IN: Portugal Announces Closing of Golden Visa Program
Portugal announced on February 16 that it will end Europe’s most famous “golden visa” program in its current form. This is to help solve the country’s housing crisis, which is caused by rising rents and property prices and affects many people, including students. In places with many people, Airbnb rentals will also be banned. Next, the government will write a law that will finally end the golden visa program. The law will be passed on by lawmakers in the parliament.
The news came at the same time that Ireland stopped giving rich investors a visa called the “Golden visa.” In its report, the European Commission says it is increasingly worried about money laundering, tax evasion, and crooks getting into the Schengen area. As a result, it has put more pressure on Portugal to end the ARI program by 2025, which gives residence permits to investors.
The Portuguese ARI golden visa program started in 2012 to help the country’s economy. After 11 years, it has raised more than 6.5 billion euros, most of which has been put into the real estate market. On average, 100 residence permits were given to people who bought land and their families every month.
There were a number of problems with the Portugal golden visa scheme, such as.
- High minimum investment (more than €280k).
- Wealth imbalance has caused a split.
- Had to deal with several incidents and court cases.
- No new jobs were made to help the economy grow.
- Investors didn’t know what to expect when rules were changed often.
- Banks were put under pressure to take foreign funds, which meant they had to spend more time and money checking them out.
- caused a housing problem in the country (because more people from outside the country bought homes).
- In order to keep their passes from running out, investors had to spend one to two weeks in Portugal.
- Homes were sold to foreign buyers for very high prices, which only helped the developers.
- The time it took to do things grew to more than a year. It was a nightmare to have biometric meetings with SEF officials. (Some people even had to wait 2 years)
- Investors don’t get citizenship right away.
- Excludes EU/EEA people
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