The UK will give you a visa if you “invest” USD2.65M in the country; historically these “millionaire visas” were used by Eastern European oligarchs and other looters whose “investments” were in shell companies or high-end, empty luxury flats, or similar socially useless ways of laundering their fortunes.
The UK vowed to reform its status as the world’s leading on-shore money laundry, but its millionaire visas are up 46%, and the largest group of visa applicants are China’s notoriously corrupt super-rich (to be clear: they are not more corrupt than the super-rich of, say, America, but that’s not much to brag about).
Research by Collyer Bristow, a law firm that advises the global super-rich, found that 405 people applied for tier 1 visas in the year to 31 March, up from 278 in the previous 12 months. The number of applicants from Russian citizens increased by 46 per cent to 52, Chinese interest rose by 26 per cent to 123. The biggest rise in applications was from Turkey, where the number rose 85 per cent to 24 following the government making it harder for Turkish citizens to apply for permanent residency.
China’s super-rich lead the way as applications for British millionaire visas surge
[South China Morning Post]