Latest / IMI Podcasts / This Week in Investment Migration - Feb 7, 2023

Transcript

This Week in Investment Migration - Feb 7, 2023 · IMI Podcasts

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to This Week in Investment Migration.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Malaysia now has four separate residence by deposit programs.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: This week, Sarawak, one of two Malaysian states that control their own immigration policies, introduced its own version of the Malaysia My Second Home, MM2H program.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sarawak's program offers essentially the same benefits as its federal counterpart, the right to reside for five plus five years anywhere in Malaysia, but at one-fifth of the cost.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: This week on the Mobility Standard Podcast, David Lesperance and Melvin Warshaw discussed the persistent uptick in American interest in investment migration and renunciation, the tax pitfalls American expats need to avoid at all costs, and the three positions American high net worth individuals take on the expatriation question.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Our new report, Low Tax Living in High Tax Europe, provides a guide to eleven special tax regimes in eight Western European countries that enable individuals to pay a single-digit tax rate in otherwise high tax countries.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It covers regimes that are particularly favorable to those who receive high passive incomes such as dividends, capital gains, rental income, royalties, and similar, as well as those with high professional incomes.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you or your client are attracted to Western Europe for its lifestyle proposition but deterred from residing there full time by high levels of taxation, this guide will show you how to have your cake and eat it too.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The European Council has agreed to give Vanuatu another 18 months to reform its program before it implements a full suspension of the country from the Schengen area's visa waiver agreement.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Vanuatu has agreed to work with full transparency during the reform, inviting the EU to observe and advise the process.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Theoretically, at least, we may soon see a CIP that's not only EU approved, but also partly EU-devised.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: 2022 was the year Grenada's Citizenship by Investment Program joined its peers in St.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Kitts and Nevis and Dominica to become the third Caribbean CIP in history to receive more than a thousand applications in a single year.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth quarter, 2022 statistics released by the country's finance ministry last week reveal Grenada's program broke a wide array of its own records.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: All-time highs were set for applications, approvals, revenue, and per applicant investment.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The backlog, unfortunately, has reached unprecedented highs as well.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Lawsuits against Portugal's SEF from Golden Visa applicants, some of whom have waited for more than two years to get an appointment, are multiplying.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: What began with a handful of successful and highly publicized cases last summer has, by the SEF's own count, mushroomed to sixty three suits so far.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Industry observers expect a deluge of suits as delays persist.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: True Blue Development, the company behind the Kawana Bay Resort Project in Grenada, this week issued a press release in which they confirmed the international arbitration proceedings against the government are moving ahead.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: While the developers say an amicable settlement remains a possibility, they also state that such an outcome has been complicated by the extensive damage caused to the project by the actions of the former government.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Even if the parties do come to terms, the project could be hard to sell at this point.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: The UK government said it would increase scrutiny of all citizenship by investment programs, CIPs, in the Caribbean to determine whether they could undermine the UK's national security.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Antigua and Barbuda, which has long called for an open dialogue and deeper engagement with the EU, UK, and US on the CBI question, welcomed the news.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Portugal is in vogue.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is the favorite destination for great expat fortunes and digital nomads.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: But it isn't all fairy tales and rainbows for companies and individuals either, say Monica Santos Costa and Tiago de Magaljes, who describe three tax and legal pitfalls foreign employers must avoid.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Greek plans to raise the price on Golden Visa real estate drove a Q4 surge in applications.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Already in September, the same month as the initial announcement, applications nearly tripled to 337.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: In October it rose again to 438.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: In November, the last month for which figures are available, an unprecedented 833 investors filed applications.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: The immigration bureaus of the decentralized authorities, however, have not been able to scale up processing to cope with the sudden rise in demand, the result of which is a backlog of pending applications that has now reached nearly two thousand eight hundred.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.