The “golden passports” in Cyprus were taken away from 222 people

NICOSIA, Cyprus –

Cyprus’ government has stripped 222 wealthy investors and their family members of their citizenship, an official said Wednesday, part of an effort to repair a reputation tarnished by an anti-passport investment program that an investigation found granted citizenship illegally in hundreds of cases.

Deputy government spokesman Niovi Parisinu said the figure included 63 investors and 159 of their relatives, including spouses, children and parents.

During its 13-year run, the once-lucrative and now-defunct program repeatedly flouted its own rules and granted Cypriot passports to ineligible investors. Some are said to have committed criminal and other offenses while becoming citizens of the Mediterranean island nation.

A flurry of corruption allegations followed an undercover TV report in 2020 in which the speaker of parliament and an influential lawmaker allegedly claimed they could circumvent the rules to grant citizenship to a fictitious Chinese investor believed to be was convicted of fraud in his country.

The Cypriot government has strongly denied any corruption, but acknowledged “mistakes, loopholes and omissions” in the way the program was run. The uproar as word of the program reverberated among Cyprus’ European Union member states led the government to cancel it.

The passport program has generated more than 9 billion euros ($8.7 billion) for the country as it reeled from the 2013 financial crisis that brought it to the brink of bankruptcy and caused its second-largest bank to close.

The program proved particularly attractive to foreign investors, as obtaining an EU passport allowed them access to the entire bloc. Hundreds of passports were issued to wealthy Russians.

An independent commission investigating the program found it operated “with white marks and loopholes, no legal framework and almost no regulatory framework”.

The four-member commission said more than half of the 6,779 passports issued may have been wrongfully granted to dependents of investors or top company executives as there are no laws to allow such cases. One-third of the remainder went to investors who did not meet all the necessary criteria, it said.

The commission recommended revocation of citizenship in 85 cases where applicants may have committed felonies or other crimes to secure a passport.