Green party “Os Verdes” (The Greens) will present a project to end the issuance of residence permits for investment purposes (ARI), or golden visa.
Within its draft law, the Greens consider this program represents a «failure to create jobs» and that «throughout these years, the golden visa have been associated with illegal practices, such as corruption, embezzlement, money laundering, influence peddling, and others».
Thus, they believe, the elimination of the golden visa «is a step forward» and «an essential contribution to end a mechanism which favours economic crime and to end one of the main causes for real estate speculation and end a privilege that only benefits a few», quoted Lusa.
Created in 2012, the golden visa program has been criticised, especially by PEV (Green Party), PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) and Bloco de Esquerda (Left Block) which, in 2019 applauded the recommendation from the Parliament’s special committee for Member States to end this type of regimes.
Since coming into force and until February, the program has already motivated an aggregated investment of 5.724 million euro, 5.177 million euro of which were invested on the purchase of real estate assets, 288 of which under urban renewal. The capital transfer attracted almost 547 million euro.