This Week in Investment Migration - Feb 7, 2023

IMI Podcasts

Malaysia now has four separate residence-by-deposit programs after Sarawak - one of two Malaysian states that control their own immigration policies - introduced its own version of the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) program. Sarawak’s program offers essentially the same benefits as its federal counterpart - the right to reside for 5+5 years anywhere in Malaysia - but at one-fifth of the cost.

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 HNWIs take on the expatriation question.

Our new report - Low-Tax Living in High-Tax Europe - provides a guide to 11 special tax regimes in eight Western European countries that enable individuals to pay a single-digit tax rate in otherwise high-tax countries. 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. If you, or your client, is 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.

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. Vanuatu has agreed to work with full transparency during the reform, inviting the EU to observe and advise the process. Theoretically, at least, we may soon see a CIP that’s not only approved by the EU but partially devised by it.

2022 was the year Grenada’s Citizenship by Investment Program joined its peers in Saint Kitts & Nevis and Dominica to become the third Caribbean CIP in history to receive more than a thousand applications in a single year. Q4 2022 statistics released by the country’s Finance Ministry last week reveal Grenada’s program broke a wide array of its own records: All-time highs were set for applications, approvals, revenue, and per-applicant investment. The backlog, unfortunately, has reached unprecedented highs as well.

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. What began with a handful of successful and highly publicized cases last summer has, by the SEF’s own count, mushroomed to 63 suits so far. Industry observers expect a deluge of suits as delays persist.

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. While the developers