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Does Panama’s 0% Tax Golden Visa Beat the UAE’s? · IMI Podcasts

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Mikhail Thorpe.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm from expatmoney.com and today I want to talk to you guys about my home country of Panama and why it might want to appear on your radar.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I've lived in Panama for the last six and a half years.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now I've been an expat for 25 years living in nine different countries.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I actually left the UAE after living there for almost a decade and relocated my family to Panama.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Why did I do this?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because I wanted to be in a food, water, energy independent country that also still had the excellent tax benefits.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: So they have a slightly different tax system, but the way that we structure things and we do all this legally is in reality, as long as you're not an American, it's a tax-free country.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's done at the constitutional level because this is a territorial tax country.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to that, I love living in Panama because they have fantastic weather.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very safe country, very modern.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: We have organic food, we've got the Atlantic, the Caribbean, we've got the Pacific, so there's surfing and there's diving, there's lots of activities, things like that.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you like hiking or mountain biking, there's a lot of things like this.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: We have excellent medical facilities.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're very close to Tucumen Airport here in Panama City, which is an international airport.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: We've got Copa Airlines, the oldest airline on planet Earth, the oldest commercial airline on planet Earth that flies all over the Caribbean, all over Central America, South America, United States, Canada, all of these types of places.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you add in other airlines coming in, there's direct flights to Europe, there's direct flights to Istanbul.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can do 10 times a week, 14-hour flight to Istanbul and return to Panama City.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is an amazing opportunity if you want to be in a hub destination country.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And when I share this with my American and Canadian clients and I bring them down here to take a look at the country, and the response has just been so fantastic.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So as I said, I am just super duper bullish on Panama.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're listening to this and you're going, that's great, Mikel, I agree with you.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think Panama is an excellent destination.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: How do I get there?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the best visa we have here is called the Qualified Investors Visa.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are many different types of visas here in Panama, probably around 20 different visas, but we're gonna put the domestic help visas and you know these types of visas aside.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: The best visa is the qualified investors visa.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a$300,000 real estate investment.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the nice thing about this is it doesn't have to be a government-approved project.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, this is the strength of the project.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: This means you can invest in commercial real estate, you can invest in office spaces, you can do residential, you can do raw land, you can put two properties together and qualify.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of things that you can do to be able to get this visa.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you need to have a clean criminal record check.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you're bringing in a spouse, you need to have your marriage certificate.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you're bringing in your kids under the age of 18, you have to have their birth certificates.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna need to have everything apostile.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Your first visit to Panama, I need you here for five days.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Usually my clients are arriving on Sunday.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: On Monday, we take them to the law office, we do a lot of the work, then Tuesday's kind of a chill out day, and then Wednesday we go back and we get the cards and everything like that, your photo taken.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, so what do you get in return through going through this process, investing in the real estate, gathering all of these documents?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you get a straight to permanent residency.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a temporary residency, it has no expiration date.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: As long as you can continue to qualify for the visa, you're gonna have it for now until the day that you die.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what are those qualifiers?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you need to visit Panama one day every two years.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: As long as you can do that, you are good.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to that, you must keep the real estate for a minimum of five years.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: But let's say that you come into Panama and you invest in an investment property and you decide you want to move here after a year and you wanna take that money and you wanna move it into a home.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can do that.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: You actually have a six-month window where you can sell the investment property and move the money into the new property.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as you do that, you are fine.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: After five years, you can sell the original property or sell the new property.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can take the money out of the country, you can leave the money in the country.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: There are many options here for this.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you can build a real life here in Panama.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing it as I would say the most popular program that we work with, not just in Latin America, but anywhere in the world.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, as I said before, I've lived in many different countries around the world.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in Singapore before the Marina Sands when all of that area was being built up.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in Abu Dhabi for eight years, seeing all of these things build up and the growth of Dubai and things like that.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I like being in a high-growth country where everything, the best years are in front of us.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You see the momentum and everything that's happening.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Here in Panama, it is absolutely the same feeling.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have the new cruise terminal, we have the new convention hall.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Casco Viejo is being rebuilt.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: They've put in new highways, they're building a fourth bridge across the canal.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's billions of dollars of infrastructure coming into this country.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this makes me super bullish on the entire area.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be in a country that has growth.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I want to participate in this growth because a rising tide lifts all boats.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So all of my investments and my clients' investments and everything like this, it goes up just by positioning yourself in a country which is forward looking.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the administration we have here.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this is traditionally what we've seen here in Panama.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm very bullish on the trajectory of Panama.