Portugal’s SEF Immigration Service revealed this week that there is “an extraordinary level of recuperation” in granting so-called gold visas for residence in the country, adding that applications from around 1,300 investors are either pending or being processed.
At the end of last year, according to SEF, “there were more than 6,000 pending ARI applications,” and at the ARI website – where the applications for the scheme are registered – in mid-June, “just nine applications were pending validation.”
Since the programme was created in 2012, around 27,000 residence permits have been issued, including initial permits and renewals for investors and family members.
In the first half of the year, the investment raised through the ‘golden visa’ scheme totalled €484,029,198.98, down by 18.8 percent from €596.4 million in the same period of 2017.
Since the launch of the ‘golden visas’ on 8 October, 2012, until June of this year – investment totals €3,895,295,041.37, of which €366,144,760.19 related to capital transfer and €3,529,150,281.18 for the purchase of real estate.
Since the creation of the scheme with a view to attracting investments 6,369 residence permits have been granted: two in 2012, 494 in 2013, 1,526 in 2014, 766 in 2015, 1,414 in 2016, 1,351 in 2017 and 816 in 2018.
From its creation until June, 6,017 visas have been granted for the acquisition of real estate, 341 for capital transfers, and 11 for the creation of at least 10 jobs.
China leads the list of gold visas granted (3,890 until June), followed by Brazil (561), South Africa (254), Turkey (224) and Russia (222).
It has also meanwhile been revealed that investment attracted through so-called ‘golden visas’ – fast-track resident permits for big foreign investors from outside the European Union – totalled €52.8 million in June, up 34.6 percent on a year earlier, but for the first half as a whole was down 18.8 percent, according to SEF.
“there has been an extraordinary level of recovery, as about 1,300 requests from investors at national level are pending, many of which are due to a lack of essential documents or the need to clarify or update them, or because of a lack of biometric data collection.”
