There are still thousands of pending Golden Visa applications as mostly Chinese punters queue up to be granted a range of enviable benefits when they buy a property in Portugal over a prescribed value.
After several months of poor performance at the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF) whose staff processes the documentation, the rise in October saw 119 requests granted, up from 37 in September.
The scandal-hit scheme has never recovered from the 2014 boom and was suspended for a time due to incompetent redrafting of the necessary legislation to tighten the detail.
The monthly rate of 60 successful applications this year is well below the 126 per month in 2014 but the growth in October is seen as a positive sign by Luís Lima, president of the estate agents’ trade body who also noted the 3,000 to 4,000 applications held up in the pipeline.
Lima reckons this pending investment is around €3.5 billion and he regrets the delay especially as the equivalent Spanish scheme has quadrupled its intake in the first six months of the year.
The changes to the scheme, promoted by Deputy Prime Minister Paulo Portas, were introduced in July this year in the wake of the arrest of 11 people in Operation Labyrinth who are alleged to have benefitted personally from fast-tracking certain applications.
The arrests included senior members of the government, with the Minister of Internal Affairs, Miguel Macedo, resigning while claiming he had done nothing wrong. He since has been charged.
The new laws kicked in at the end of September 2015 and allowed Golden Visa applicants a broader choice of qualifying investments, such as in projects associated with culture, science and urban development.
No visas have been issued for these investment areas and while the numbers are low and the whiff of scandal hangs in the air, Portas is nowhere to be seen as he hates backing schemes that might make him look suspect.
The government has received some income from property sales taxes but the real winners have been top-end estate agents and the property sellers many of whom will have left the country after offloading their property, or at least the money from the sale will have.
No sensible analysis has been commissioned to looks into the real economic benefits of the scheme which offers already rich foreigners a potentially tax free existence in Portugal while the rest of the working population and the nation’s pensioners continue to suffer raised income tax levels that leave many unable to cater for basic household expenditure.
The government argues that as other countries are offering such schemes, Portugal would be missing out if it did not join in, and there is some sympathy with this view but the inequality promoted and produced is hard for many to comprehend.
