FILE PHOTO: Britain's Home Secretary Priti Patel leaves Downing Street, in London, Britain July 24, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay
U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel said she’s scrapping "with immediate effect” a visa program for millionaire investors as part of efforts to cut down on fraud.
Closing the so-called Tier 1 investor visa "is just the start of our renewed crackdown on fraud and illicit finance,” Patel said in a statement on Thursday. The program offered wealthy foreigners a path to residency if they invested more than 2 million pounds ($2.7 million) in the U.K.
The move follows a Home Office review into visas already granted under the program, and comes as the government looks to curb the influence of Russian money.
The British government began the review in 2018, shortly after the poisoning of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury led to a deterioration in relations between the U.K. and the Kremlin.
Home Office data compiled by Shard Capital shows that there were about 1,400 investor visas issued between 2015 and 2020.
A Parliamentary report from 2020 said there had been "exploitation” of the investor visa program and that it "offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’.”
