Our View: President’s laxness over citizenship scheme unjustifiable  

The auditor-general’s eagerly awaited report about the notorious citizenship by investment scheme was released on Monday and catalogued a long list of irregularities. There were violations of procedures, violations of the law, abuse of discretionary powers, concealment of unhelpful information and a general disregard for the criteria the government had set in order to give the scheme a semblance of legitimacy.

Since the scheme was introduced in 2008, 7,327 citizenships were granted in total, but of these only 3,517 went to actual investors. More than half the citizenships (3,810) went to members of the families of the investors, including their spouses, parents and adult offspring that were dependent. One woman granted citizenship as a dependent offspring of an investor was married and had three children, the audit office pointed out in the report.

The report also mentioned cases in which information provided by officials at the interior ministry, indicating that an applicant was ineligible, was not forwarded to the cabinet when issuing its approval. It also claimed there were cases in which the cabinet exceeded the most “extreme boundaries of discretionary powers in approving applications, which constituted abuse of power; it also pursued ends that were incompatible with the purpose of the law”.

Although the cabinet takes collective responsibility for its decisions, the overall responsibility for what was happening belongs to the president. He was the only who could have prevented the abuse of discretionary powers by the cabinet and insisted on all criteria being met before the cabinet even looked at an application. If the interior minister was submitting applications for approval to the cabinet that did not satisfy the criteria, it could only have been because the president had tolerated, if not encouraged, such a lax approach to citizenship applications. It is the president that sets the standards, which in the case of the citizenship scheme did not really exist.

What is even more damning for President Anastasiades was that his family was benefiting financially from the citizenship by investment scheme, both as a law office and as developers. This was no secret, even though the investigations skimmed over the possibility of conflict of interest. Anastasiades has denied any involvement in his family’s business enterprises. Accepting that he had nothing to do with the family businesses does not, however, make the laxness with which this particular state policy was pursued and handled more justifiable.

Both investigations into the scheme carried out in Cyprus found that rules, regulations criteria were systematically ignored by the cabinet. And the one man that had the power to stop this, the president, did nothing for years.