Five years after the conclusion of the committee led by Myron Nikolatos, which was the trigger for the revocation of citizenships generously distributed by the Republic before 2021, the deprivation of passports is also proving to be a difficult task.
This is also shown by yesterday's decision of the Administrative Court after the examination of the application of businessman Anubhav Aggarwal. The latter, through his lawyer Simos Angelidis ("Andreas S. Angelidis LLC) appealed to the said judiciary for the annulment of the administrative acts for the deprivation of his citizenship and was vindicated. Thus, the act of removing the status of Cypriot citizen is considered invalid.
Simply put, not only were foreign investors abusively acquiring Cypriot citizenship, but – as it seems in this case – the status of Cypriot citizens was just as abusively revoked to some of them. It should be noted here that in this case the Cypriot citizenship of the members of the investor's family had also been revoked.
Judge Ariadni Zervou, in her relevant verdict, after first citing all the facts surrounding the case, concludes the following: "Having set out above in detail the facts of the present case, what the applicant put before the Independent Committee, its decision and the relevant decisions of the Council of Ministers, I conclude that the applicant is justified in protesting for lack of proper investigation and reasoning, error and violation of the principle of proportionality".
Ms. Zervou, justifying her decision, points out the following facts:
>> The Investigative Committee never made a recommendation for the deprivation of Aggarwal's citizenship, but for an examination of the possibility of deprivation.
>> The Council of Ministers, without any further investigation, took the decision to deprive the applicant of Cypriot citizenship, a decision which it confirmed limited to the opinion of the Independent Committee for the Examination of Deprivation of Citizenship.
>> The applicant is justified in complaining that the right to address the Independent Committee was given to him only formally.
>> The Commission failed to compare and evaluate what he submitted in detail in the multi-page letter of his lawyers, in particular in relation to, on the one hand, his involvement in what is imputed to him and the information which he was judged to have concealed when submitting his application for naturalisation and, on the other hand, in relation to the fact that any deprivation of Cypriot citizenship renders him stateless. Aggarwal, with the acquisition of the Cypriot passport, simultaneously lost his Indian citizenship on the basis of legislation in India.
>> The Independent Committee, despite the multi-page nature of its recommendation, essentially limited itself to the finding (which is also repeated by the educated lawyer of the respondents in his speech) that the applicant, when submitting his application, did not mention "his involvement in criminal judicial proceedings which preceded his application and naturalization". However, on the basis of what the applicant stated in detail in the letter of his lawyers, it does not seem that any case against the applicant before a criminal court had been registered before a criminal court before or at the material time of submission of the naturalization application, a fact which did not receive due investigation, even though it was the only (ultimately) reason for taking such a drastic and unfavourable measure, as the deprivation of the applicant's citizenship. And the conclusions of the Independent Committee on the concealment from the applicant of "his persecution by the Indian police" and his involvement "in criminal judicial proceedings", at the essential time of submission of his application for naturalization, seem to be erroneous.
>> However, the most serious defect that I find in the present case is the fact that the fact that any deprivation of Cypriot citizenship by the applicant renders him stateless was not examined at any level, nor evaluated, nor did it give any elementary concern before the adoption of the contested decision. This, in fact, despite the fact that the issue was explicitly and in detail raised in the letter of the applicant's lawyers, dated 22.12.2021, in the context of the applicant's position on the violation of the principle of proportionality and the international obligations of the Republic of Cyprus, with extensive references to international treaties, guidelines and case law of the CJEU.
>> It should be noted that, as P. D. Dagtoglou3 explains, the essence of the prior hearing lies in the fact that it establishes "the right of the interested party to participate in the administrative procedure and a corresponding obligation of the administrative authorities to take into account their views when formulating the content of the administrative decision".
>> In addition, it is recalled that the Court limits itself to reviewing the legality of the contested act and does not make a primary assessment of the data of each case. Therefore, in the absence of any relevant assessment and judgment at the time of the adoption of the contested decision, it is for the respondents to examine and rule on the applicant's allegations and the alleged violation of the principle of proportionality as a result of the stateless status resulting from the decision to deprive him of Cypriot citizenship since he no longer holds another nationality, on the basis of all the facts of the present case, including the commitments arising from international and European law, the findings of the report of the Investigative Committee regarding the criterion of "honesty" at the material time of submission of the applicant's application for naturalization, but also the information that Form M127 specifically required to be declared.
In the conclusion of the committee for the Exceptional Naturalizations of Foreign Investors, it was noted that for Anubhav Aggarwal: "During the submission of his application, the investor failed to mention his relationship with the company ARK Imports Private Limited and the fact that he was being investigated by the Indian authorities for the NSEL scam case involving a scandal with spot exchanges and escaped arrest. Therefore, the investor appears to have submitted false and/or misleading information about his activities."
