1 Introduction
On 21 May 2018, the Cyprus Council of Ministers decided to
revise and streamline the Cyprus Citizenship by Investment
Programme for foreign investors/entrepreneurs for the purpose of
enhancing the credibility, ethics and conduct of the programme, in
addition to renaming the same into the "Cyprus Investment
Programme" (the "Programme"). These
changes are effective as of 1 August 2018.
2 Main Changes:
The main changes to the Programme are as follows:
- introduction of a cap of 700 approved
applications per year;
- examination of the application for
citizenship will take place over a period of six months instead of
three months;
- investor is obliged to maintain the
investment property for a period of three years as from the date of
the naturalisation and additionally in cases where the investment
of property is under construction, the investment period will
commence from the issuance of the town planning permit;
