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Comment by digianarchist | Hacker News Reader

Cyprus is under investigation by the EU, along with Malta for “selling” citizenships.

I do not understand why selling citizenships is wrong. If both the seller and the buyer agree to a price, what's the problem?

Whether right or wrong, if the community that you are apart of is affected, then there are implications... some of which can become problems.

I don't see what kind of problems could arise from this. From the point of view of the country the number of citizens remains constant. Only the name and the facial features of the passport-holder have changed. There may of course be a fee for updating the passport, besides the price of the interchange.

It's not that a citizen sells their citizenship to a non-citizen and therefore becomes a non-citizen. It's the country selling citizenships, meaning each sale results in one more citizen.

Anything done to the community affects it in some way - that criticism could be applied to sending a fruit basket to every Cypriot. Someone could get sick by eating fruit from it after it went bad.

It doesn't have to all be criticism. And that's why I said implications. Not all implications are bad.

Because those people never lived and will never live in Cyprus or EU, but the citizenship gives them rights in elections and access to a different banking system, for the sole purpose of evading laws.

Listened to a podcast about this subject recently (in German though: [0]).

What eg. a German (very!) rich person would do is get a second passport in Cyprus and then open a Swiss bank account. To the Swiss bank, they'd say that they only have that one passport from Cyprus. Therefore, the Swiss bank does not report to the German state that the German individual has a bank account. This is how that person avoids German tax.

0. https://www.kuechenstud.io/medienradio/podcast/di090-geldwae...

Thus it would seem that Cyprus citizens would be able to demand high prices for selling their passports, which cannot be a bad thing. Then, Cyprus could enter into an agreement with Germany or Switzerland to share bank data if that becomes a problem.

Isn't the whole point of EU to have a common market?

also how does having a large bank account in swiss affects her taxes in germany?

But this doesn't apply to the US. After 9/11 international banks have to share account details with the US Government if they want to transact with US banks.

This is tax fraud, if you're willing to commit crimes it is very easy to avoid taxes.

Note that an EU country citizenship by extension results in an EU citizenship. All EU citizens are granted special rights such as freedom of movement, right to work, social welfare, et cetera all throughout the EU.

If a country sells its citizenships, that country alone benefits financially from that transaction, but the potential obligations are borne by the entire EU community.

In my opinion, there is nothing inherently wrong about a country selling its citizenship, but in the EU framework it seems to go against the good faith principles that the EU is built on.

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