Buy a house without any payment. Buy a house and start making money out of it. Buy a house and get freebies. We are all familiar with the offers and promises that real estate companies dazzle us with. But what Leptos Estates is offering is beyond the ordinary. Buy a house and get a new home country.
And nowhere else but Europe!
Yes, you read it right. Offering anything from citizenship of the European Union if not a PR (permanent residence), the multinational real estate firm is promising a 'fast track', literally and figuratively, to a dream that many Indians harbour – to live abroad.
And no, this does not involve human trafficking and dodging security forces by travelling in boats overnight. Leptos offer is very much a provision in the law (though EU is increasingly calling it a 'loophole') to bring in 'investors' who could spend money in the host European states in return for residence permit.
While many countries, including the US and the UK, have a certain number of PR or citizenship slots for rich investors, Leptos claims that nothing beats the terms offered by Cyprus and Greece, the two southern-most European countries in the Mediterranean where it has property developments. All one has to do? Pay the equivalent of Rs 2 crore to buy a flat in Greece (RS 2.5 crore when it comes to sea-facing villas in Cyprus) and get a PR.
While a PR is promised in 10 to 15 days in both countries, the Greek PR has the additional advantage of coming with an automatic 'Schengen'—you can travel, live and work visa-free across the Schengen countries of the European Union.
While permanent residents in both countries can apply for citizenship through the regular route after seven years, those who can invest more are guaranteed a faster way to get a EU passport – in Cyprus, investing an equivalent of around RS 16 crore get you the priced document within two months.
Leptos is a multinational real estate player, the biggest in the Mediterranean region, and has jumped into the fray, its officials say, after noticing the trend of high net worth Indians making a beeline for foreign countries. “6,000 Indians migrated to Cyprus last year alone,” points out Sanjay Sachdev, head of marketing at Leptos.
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A recent Knight Frank report says 20 per cent of India's rich showed an affinity towards purchasing homes outside India.
While many countries offer an investment route to gaining residency, the amount, and conditions, are much stricter. For the US, for example, the minimum property investment for a similar offer is an equivalent of around Rs 35 crore. Getting a PR requires you to be in the country for three years out of five, followed by an eight-year wait for citizenship. The rules related to this provision, EB5, however, have been getting stricter in recent years.
The reason the stipulations for Greece and Cyprus are much lighter dates back to the virtual collapse of the banking systems, and the ensuing economic hardship of both countries at the beginning of this decade, forcing them to use this generous scheme as a means to getting foreign investment. It worked, with thousands of crores flowing in, eventually leading to the stabilising of economies of both the nations.
However, the European Union had always been wary of the scheme, generally termed 'golden passport', because of allegations that it was a conduit for third world elites and those with unsavoury sources of money using this 'fast track' facility to start a new, plush life. The issue has boiled over in recent times after revelations of former Cambodian PM Hun Sen who made use of the scheme to route the money he filched from his home country to lead a lavish life in the Mediterranean island nation. Another personality in the crosshairs is Low Taek Jho, a Malaysian businessman accused of misappropriating an equivalent of more than Rs 30,000 crore from his country's state investment fund, money from which was apparently used to get a Cypriot passport. A reason why Leptos deputy president Pantelis M. Leptos even added wryly, “It is a limited period offer.”