Filenews 17 April 2021 - by Chrysanthos Manolis
The suspicions of some of the public are confirmed to a considerable extent before the investigative committee's interim finding is even published and before the investigation is completed: Most of the exceptional naturalisms carried out were illegal or abusive, with their percentage possibly far exceeding the 51.8% that the Research Committee itself announced yesterday.
This is because, through the statement of the President of research, Myron Nikolatou, at the time of the delivery of the interim finding to the Attorney General, but also through a communication from the Committee, it is clarified that in addition to 51.8% of illegal or in excess of the naturalized natural registration law (regarding the relatives of naturalized investors) there is also an unspecified number of naturalisations, which were made under the law (i.e. the applicants were potential beneficiaries) but the criteria were not met. That is, they (unknown how many) were illegal or irregular naturalities. If the information confirms that there is a large number of passports given to investors (not relatives) in violation of the criteria, without even justifying by the Ministerial the derogation from the criteria, it is likely that the publication of the interim finding or later of the final finding will bring Cypriot society before a very painful - and now confirmed - reality as to the implementation of the Cyprus Investment Programme.
It should be noted that naturalations that do not meet the criteria have been identified during the investigation and for the Christofias period of government and some of them are considered serious. However, the total natural recorded up to 2013 was around 140, so the vast majority of illegal naturalisations (investors and their relatives) relate to the Anastasiades government, which was inevitably involved, with the publication of the interim report, additional and serious political costs.
Dozens of stories
In his statements at the time of delivery of the interim finding, Myron Nikolatos said that there are also suggestions for considering the possibility of "deprivation of citizenship in a few dozen cases". It is obvious from this report that the Commission does not recommend the removal of passports from the relatives of investors, estimated to reach 3,500. We are informed that this may be due to the fact that relatives are not considered to be responsible for the violation of their naturalisation law, for which the government is responsible. It is therefore considered at first sight that the deprivation of Cypriot citizenship by them is not legitimised. The same seems to apply to a large number of naturalities approved in breach of the criteria, also under the responsibility of the Government and the State agencies, which either did not understand that not all the criteria were met or - there were many such cases - considered that the public interest required the approval of applications, without the applicants concealing evidence or submitting misleading information.
However, this discretion, which appears to be recognised by the Investigative Committee in the Council of Ministers, has not been exercised in most cases lawfully, that is, the use of this discretion has not been recorded and justified. Most importantly, the House - nor anyone else - was informed of the derogation from criteria, contrary to almost all the briefings it received indicated that naturalized were carried out according to the criteria. Which Mr Nikolatos says today is that in some cases, at least, it was not the case.
In any case, the decision on natural declarations to be cancelled will be taken by the Attorney General and the Committee for the Deprivation of Nationalities, established by the Law of 2020.
We've been fooled by a lot of people.
In addition to cases where a breach of the criteria has been detected, there are, as we are informed, many serious cases of apparent deception of the State, through the filing of false or misleading information, without them being detected either by the providers (intermediaries), or by government officials, agencies and ministries.
In addition, however, it seems to confirm in some cases the information - but also earlier data through the relevant reports of the Auditor-General - that an attitude prevailed in the management and approval of applications, resulting in problematic applications being approved without highlighting the slightest problem, applications for which there was proper labelling for problems were ignored and passports were given seamlessly and applications that one of the two competent ministries (Internal and Finance) was identifying problems and the other (usually the Finance) requested their approval for... economic-investment reasons.
From the information available, it does not appear at this stage that responsibilities are attributed through the finding to intermediaries in Cyprus, which will concern the committee in the meantime until 9 June, which will have to deliver its final finding.
As mentioned yesterday by Mr Nikolatos, in some cases where there was no unanimity (disagreement on some points in the conclusions by assistant auditor-general Kyriakos Kyriakou) the disagreement was recorded in the text.
