Portugal’s Foreign Minister, Augusto Santos Silva, has announced that the Portuguese government has approved 850 Golden Visa in just over a month.
Admitting that there have been severe delays for those waiting for their visas, the minister said that the situation has been difficult but that the backlog is being tackled.
"The situation when I took office was heart-rending, the processes had all but ground to a halt," said Augusto Santos Silva in response to a question in parliament from the opposition which wanted to know how he was getting on with the mess it had created for him.
The minister said he had created a special team of people from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of the Economy to sort the delay which he said had been ‘brutal,’ adding that in just over a month, 850 Golden Visa had been issued.
Despite observations that the Golden Visa programme merely brings forward property sales that would have happened anyway, sooner or later, the scheme is government policy and has performed well against other countries offering travel and taxation incentives to non-EU citizens buying property in Portugal.
The downside has been the inordinate delay in processing the applications, made worse after tougher measures were introduced in the wake of the fraud and corruption investigation that saw senior staff and one minister arrested as part of Operation Labyrinth.
The year-end backlog in 2015 was estimated at over 3,000 foreign applicants who were waiting to hear if they had been successful in gaining entry to Portugal. If Augusto Santos Silva can shift this backlog, he will receive praise from estate agents from across the Republic.
