An international consultancy has reviewed investment attraction programmes in 19 countries which offer some sort of Golden Visa scheme and concluded that Portugal has the best.
The 'Global Residence and Citizenship Programs 2015' report from Henley & Partners points out that the minimum investment in qualifying property is €500,000 in Portugal, a value which the authors consider as low: also that property purchase costs and taxes are set at an attractive level.
The various programmes were ranked according to 10 indicators: Reputation, Quality of Life, Tax, Visa Free Access, Processing Time and Quality of Processing, Compliance, Investment Requirements, Total Costs, Time to Citizenship and Citizenship Requirements.
Of these 10 factors analysed, the low Total Costs clearly was the most favorable for Portugal, followed by Austria and Belgium.
The report did not dwell on last November’s arrest by Judicial Police officers of 11 people suspected of corruption, money laundering, influence trafficking and embezzlement as part of an investigation into Portugal's Golden Visa’ scheme, the result of which has been a slowdown in application processing speeds coupled with a lowering of some of the financial criteria.
