The small town of Atherton, in San Francisco Bay (California), is popular with renowned athletes, successful Silicon Valley billionaires and prominent politicians. It is more surprising that in 2013, D.C had the means to afford a dream villa with her husband for nearly $6 million (5.7 million euros), given her income as an immigration lawyer.
The little local mystery was finally dispelled following a long investigation by the SEC, the American financial markets watchdog, which unraveled the gigantic scam set up by the couple to amass at least $12 million by embezzling money from foreign investors seeking to obtain a residence permit in the United States, for almost a decade.
The day after his indictment, October 18, 2018, Mr. C. managed to leave the United States thanks to an assumed name, Maria Sofia Taylor, written on her Dominican passport. The lawyer, however, has no ties with Dominica, a little Caribbean confetti stuck between Guadeloupe and Martinique: to escape American justice, she secretly bought this second citizenship a few weeks earlier, as part of a passport of convenience program implemented by the island. And it is far from being an isolated case.
Thousands of people have acquired Dominican nationality in this way by taking advantage of the program “citizenship by investment” (CBI, “citizenship through investment”). This system, set up by the government in 1993, allows any foreign national to acquire a passport in less than three months, on the sole condition of paying $100,000 or investing double that amount in the economy. local, without even having to set foot on the island.
For the first time, a joint investigation by World, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) consortium, the American NGO Government Accountability Project and a dozen partner media shed light on the abuses of this passport of convenience program. For more than a year, journalists pored over a list of 7,700 recent holders of Dominican passports, compiled from public sources and court documents.
Circumvention of sanctions to broadcast La Liga
Among these thousands of new Dominicans – often entire families coming mainly from China, Russia and Middle Eastern countries – we find a litany of criminals and crooks of all kinds: Taiwanese fraudsters, Azeri oligarchs, a former Afghan minister accused of war crimes and torture, a senior officer in Gaddafi’s Libya, former spies, financial fraudsters and even Russian billionaires under sanctions and arms dealers. The list also contains many senior public officials: two central bank governors and a former head of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program alongside Samir Rifaï, the former Jordanian prime minister (2009-2011), who had nevertheless declared a few years ago years he didn’t love “not, from a personal point of view and in general, that a Jordanian has another nationality”.