Marshall Islands.
How Marshall Islands sells citizenship for investors: 1 citizenship programme, now closed. Every number and rule below links to the document it comes from.
4 documents and articles behind this page, listed at the bottom.
Citizenship
Sells citizenship, and with it a passport. Marshall Islands: 1 citizenship programme, now closed; 3 numbers, 4 prices and rules. Every country's citizenship programmes
All the numbers, sources and downloads for Marshall Islands in the data portal →
- Status
- Lowest price when it closed
- Last change
Passport sales (1987–2001)
Sells citizenship, and with it a passport.
Official name: Marshall Islands sale of passports and citizenship (Citizenship Act 1984 s. 404(4), 'passport investment and sales program')
Fee on the books when the passport-sale clause was repealed (18 Oct 2001), as cut in 1989 from $200,000; printed only as "$". Later amendments may have changed it and were not read.
Notes from the research
Real and legal: s. 404 of the Citizenship Act 1984 let Cabinet naturalise people for distinguished service or 'in the public interest', and a subsection (4) on the sale of passports was added by P.L. 1989-37; P.L. 1989-68 lowered the fee for a passport from $200,000 to $100,000 (currency not named). Cabinet suspended the programme on 20 June 1996 (reported), citing misleading advertising in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China and US concerns; the subsection was repealed on 18 Oct 2001. An academic report dates sales to 1987-1996 and estimates about 2,000 citizenships sold, mainly to Chinese buyers. Unofficial agents sold passports for $30,000 with false promises of US entry. Today s. 404 allows at most five discretionary naturalisations a year. 'launched' is the year of the enabling amendment; the amending acts and any official count were not found.
Prices and rules
What is measured
- Court award relating to CBI money1
- Investor funds misused or misappropriated (per case)1
- People who became citizens1
What we know is missing
- No yearly figures at all for applications or people let in or money raised.
A gap means no figure is in our data: either it was never published or we haven't found or read it yet. Charts leave gaps open rather than drawing across them.
All the numbers we have for Marshall Islands
3 numbers about Marshall Islands's citizenship programmes. Pick a programme and what you want to see. Each dot is one number from one document; click anything to open its source.
What happened, and when
The 4 documents behind this page
- 2020-02 · ResearchComparative Regional Report on Citizenship Law: Oceania (RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp 2020/1) · European University Institute, GLOBALCIT
- 2015-11 · Law or regulationCitizenship Act 1984 (43 MIRC Ch. 4), consolidated text with legislative history notes · Republic of the Marshall Islands, Office of the Attorney-General (via Nitijela website)
- 2002-05 · NewsMan jailed for passport scam · Marianas Variety (Pacnews)
- 1996-06 · NewsPassport sales halted (Marshall Islands Journal, 22 June 1996, p. 19; reposted in the Journal's archive column) · Marshall Islands Journal
Who buys passports and golden visas, what they cost, and what happens when governments change the rules. Written from this data, in the newsletter.