BBC ARTICLE ON CITIZENSHIP BY INVESTMENT MISLEADS THE INVESTING PUBLIC

The recent vanilla BBC article that Simon Woolley recently brought to our attention on Citizenship by Investment passport sales is artfully deceptive, and I strongly suspect it was really authored by one of the companies that inhabit the "Investment Migration" industry, although the concept of migration has nothing to do with those prized EU and UK-accessible identity documents. They offer seamless entry, and little more.

The article completely fails to disclose the massive Caribbean CBI and CIP corruption scandal, involving Chinese companies diverting billions of US Dollars after selling passports & citizenship at an illegal discount, which has infected all five of the Eastern Caribbean states that vend EU, UK and Commonwealth visa-free entry travel documents. Likewise, the article minimizes the chances that the EU will pull the plug on visa-free entry, and that the US Government regards them as a primary National Security risk.

The small note about the attractiveness of caribbean CBI to money launderers and other dodgy characters, placed towards the end of the article, doesn't nearly go far enough to dilute the flowery prose in the story. The investing public is left with the idea that these CBI passports are a godsend, when they are currently under attack, and currently face existential threats. Purchasers would be well advised to look elsewhere for a second passport, as compliance officers at the world's international banks again raise the risk factor involved, when encountering the holders of such documents, for good reason.