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Germany Arrests 10 for Illicitly Providing Residence Permits to Wealthy Foreigners from China and Arab Countries (www.occrp.org)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Authorities detained 10 suspects, including two lawyers and one government employee.

The group is suspected of exploiting special provisions for foreign skilled workers to issue residence permits to hundreds of wealthy foreigners, primarily Chinese nationals but also individuals from the Arab region.

Clients paid between 30,000 and 350,000 euros to the lawyers, who then created fictitious companies to employ the clients and issued them salaries on paper. This facilitated their acquisition of residence permits in Germany.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There usually is a big amount of money that if invested in country's long term stock, grant you citizenship. I think for Italy is 500k euros, don't know about Germany

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

No, this was actually an illegal scheme rather than an official one by the government like the one in Italy. Here, government officials took bribes to grant these rich foreigners fraudulent residency permits.

[–] hushable 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

New Zealand has an investor visa which grants permanent residence but not citizenship. Wouldn't be surprised if any other countries do that too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

This seems to also be the Italian scheme.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I read the article, I wrote the previous post because 350k is a lot of money but is not that far from 500k, the amount for an investors visa in Italy and I don't know the amount for that IN Germany

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

There's no investor visa in Germany as far as I'm aware, only worker visas like the ones fraudulently obtained here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I kind of get the feeling that somebody higher up is calling for a crack down on Chinese illegal practices in Germany right now. There is a lot in the past couple days, since Scholz has returned from Bejing and got nothing out of it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Got nothing out of it, on the outside.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

He apparently tried to bring Bejing to be harder on Russia and was willing to use Germanys strength to persuade the EU to go easy on China. Kind of looks like it has failed and Germany is cracking down on China, but relativly silently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

As far as I know you can sort of buy EU residence permits and even citizenship in Hungary and Malta. That information is from a few years ago and the Northern EU countries were quite upset. So maybe they stopped it.

At least we know by that that Orban is not racist, he only hates poor people.