Pakistan to offer citizenship to people who invest heavily in the country
Pakistan in process of rolling out a lucrative scheme, offering a chance to people unhappy in India to move out soon.
The Pakistani Board of Investment’s (BoI) chairman proposed a plan to offer citizenship through investment programs in the country to increase FDI. This decision was taken in a meeting of the Afghanistan Inter-ministerial Coordination Cell headed by Pakistani PM Imran Khan. Discussions about how to welcome Afghani investors provided the immediate impetus for the plan, but BoI Chairman Afzar Ahsan noted that if the programme were to be implemented, it would, in theory, be accessible to people of all ethnicities.
According to DAWN, Prime Minister Khan expressed support for the concept and directed the BoI to design a policy outlining the actual steps involved in putting a CIP into place. He also noted that numerous other nations in the region have investment migration programmes in place.
The BoI initially intended to award immediate citizenship to those who contributed at least US$1 million, albeit the concept is still in the early planning phases. A Pakistani passport would be unlikely to draw much attention from potential investor migrants even at a considerably lower price point, let alone at ten times the price of gaining a Caribbean citizenship, with visa-free access to only 31 locations globally. It is more likely that a $1,000,000 Pakistan CIP would be used to naturalise foreigners who have already made significant investments in the nation, similar to how Jordan’s CIP worked.
However, because the policy is still being developed, the BoI may decide to lower the required minimum investment level after looking at other such initiatives. It should be noted that a policy reform made Turkey’s Citizenship by Investment programme the most well-known CIP in the world. It began in 2017 with a US$1 million minimum investment requirement, however it was later reduced by 75%.
“We are looking at such a policy from all sides and it is essential to tap all options where the investments opportunities are available,” BoI Chairman told DAWN. He also said that this policy would require involvement of many government departments.
