Description
Theodoros RAKOPOULOS. Passport island : the market for EU citizenship in Cyprus. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2023, viii, 262p.
For the decade up to 2020, the Republic of Cyprus opened a route to naturalisation and citizenship by investment for non-nationals who wanted access to the EU – many of them wealthy Russians who had profited from the post-Soviet era. The magnitude of the phenomenon is staggering. Thousands of Russian, Chinese, and other investors became Cypriots by buying properties – and therefore passports – on the island. The ‘EU passport’ became the country’s major export, and the city of Limassol changed dramatically to accommodate the skyscrapers (‘passport towers’) built on the seafront.
For the decade up to 2020, the Republic of Cyprus opened a route to naturalisation and citizenship by investment for non-nationals who wanted access to the EU – many of them wealthy Russians who had profited from the post-Soviet era. The magnitude of the phenomenon is staggering. Thousands of Russian, Chinese, and other investors became Cypriots by buying properties – and therefore passports – on the island. The ‘EU passport’ became the country’s major export, and the city of Limassol changed dramatically to accommodate the skyscrapers (‘passport towers’) built on the seafront.