THE EU AND THE USE OF ETIAS TO IDENTIFY AND STOP LAUNDERERS WITH CBI PASSPORTS IN 2024

                                          

While the economic citizenship industry frets about the possibility that the European Union may discriminate against Citizenship by Investment (CBI) passport holders in 2024, when ETIAS,  the Schengen Zone's own Electronic Travel Authorization program ,is due to come into effect, there is an unexpected benefit from ETIAS of major interest to both EU law enforcement and the compliance community: the system, when paired with Artificial Intelligence platforms, will be able to identify, and therefore interdict, money launderers using such identity documents to enter Europe.

A close look at the ETIAS system reveals that individuals not born in the countries in which they hold citizenship and nationality, meaning passports, will be identified through the information gathered, as well as the passports presented for approval. In truth and in fact, EU ETIAS staff will have the ability to cull out those individuals, and request additional information, while preliminarily denying them the routine visa-free approval granted to legitimate applicants.

This means that individuals who have acquired passports through CBI means will face secondary scrutiny, and given the recent advances made in Artificial Intelligence in quickly and efficiently gathering relevant information not previously available, should be capable of not only identifying financial criminals with a high degree of certainty, thereby leveling the playing field, which has traditionally favored enterprising money launderers seeking to enter the EU from abroad. We welcome this new development, as it may prove to be critical in assisting European law enforcement in reducing the rampant money laundering which has infected Europe for decades.

For those who worry that naturalized citizens may be caught up in a dragnet designed to snare money laundering and financial criminals, attention will be focused upon only those present or former CBI jurisdictions known to sell passports & citizenship to unsuitable (i.e. criminal) applicants, like MALTA, ST. KITTS & NEVIS, ANTIGUA, DOMINICA, ST. LUCIA and GRENADA, together with some additional countries, principally in Asia and the Pacific. Legitimate naturalized citizens will have nothing to fear from ETIAS.

If you think that this is a far-fetched concept, the United States itself uses its ETA program to identify individuals who have found "creative' methods of acquiring passports from visa-free jurisdictions, using the same investigative methods and techniques to extract information on potential financial criminals that the EU will soon have in place when ETIAS goes live, sometime in 2024, literally taking a Bite out of Crime.