The Moldova parliament under the new government, voted on the draft law canceling the granting of citizenship through investment scheme.
“The citizenship through investments might be cancelled”, reported the Moldovan State News Agency.
The draft’s authors say that the opportunity to receive the citizenship of Moldova in exchange for investments worth 100,000 euros might have disastrous consequences for the country’s security and safety of the citizens. The law can lead to the granting of Moldovan citizenship to foreigners with a dubious past who could buy real estate or state-owned securities in the country, so that those money stolen (dirty).
The MPs of the ACUM bloc criticized the scheme saying the names of economic citizens were listed confidential in the official gazette signed by President
One of the authors of the bill, Sergiu Litvinenco, accused the fact that the citizenship law through investment was voted in a non-transparent way and creates risks for Moldova’s national security and for visa waiver agreement with EU.
Moldova launched CBI scheme in Nov 2018, requiring one time donation to Public state fund for 100,000 euros, or EUR 250,000 in real estate or bonds.
According to the data previously provided by Moldova authorities, 23 files have been filed since the implementation of the Citizenship By Investment Program, and two foreign persons has received a Moldovan passport.
The Moldovan media reported, the two cases who already received citizenship will be further examined and they will keep their passports after review.
Moldova citizenship scheme was expected to bring 1.3 billion euros in investments over next five years bringing economic benefit to Moldova. The scheme had a cap limit for issuing 5000 passports to citizenship investors
In 2014 Moldova suffered the worst bank fraud scandal. $1 billion disappeared from three Moldovan banks: Banca de Economii, Unibank and Banca Socială. The bank fraud in Moldova was a coordinated effort involving all three banks working together to extract as much loan finance as possible from the banks without any obvious business rationale. The total loss from the fraud scheme is equivalent to 12% of Moldova’s GDP
