Business Weekly

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Golden passports and cash for citizenship - a legitimate way to for countries to get investment or a scheme open to abuse and corruption? That’s the big question we’ll be looking at on this episode of Business Weekly. We look at why the wealthy want to acquire them. We also hear from Cyprus where a passport corruption scandal has rocked the nation. Meanwhile, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics tells us about the unusual way in which he discovered he'd won, and of course, about the game theory that netted him and a colleague the award. And we hear from the African animators who are taking on the world. Business Weekly is presented by Lucy Burton and produced by Matthew Davies.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, if a week is a long time in politics, a day is a long time in business at the moment,
0:06.1	and it can be exhausting trying to keep up with all the latest developments.
0:10.1	That's why we've interrupted your Business Daily pod feed to bring you Business Weekly,
0:14.4	a new weekend program which brings you an hour of the most interesting, inspiring,
0:19.8	and thought-provoking stories you might have missed
0:21.7	from the BBC's business team.
0:27.8	Hello and welcome to Business Weekly. I'm Lucy Burton. This week, the shine came off
0:33.4	so-called golden passports. It's an arrangement that allows the wealthy to buy foreign passports,
0:39.7	providing they can pay or invest a certain amount of money in that country. But on Tuesday,
0:45.9	the government in Cyprus announced that it scrapped their scheme after two politicians were
0:50.6	caught in a sting, agreeing to help a criminal Chinese businessman acquire a Cypriot passport. We'll take a closer look at just what this means for Cyprus in a moment. First, though, my colleague Mike Johnson has been looking at the allure of golden passports. If I were a rich man, I have a div-a-div-div-d-d-div-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Okay, so I'm at my desk at my computer-in-net browser open. I'm going to imagine for one blissful moment that I got several hundred thousand, who knows, maybe even a million or two. If I were a wealthy man, I wouldn't have to work out.
1:28.6	I quite fancy buying a second passport.
1:32.1	I'm just going to key that in now.
1:35.1	Buy a second passport.
1:37.2	Return.
1:38.3	33,400 results.
1:40.9	Best second passport, the one at the Reeds easy, affordable and reliable.
1:46.6	Next one down. Where are we? Vanuatu citizenship. That's an island, I think an island nation in the
1:51.9	South Pacific, isn't it? Great citizenship by investment for $139,000. Visa free to Europe,
1:58.2	UK and 148 countries.
2:01.3	Scrolling on down.
2:02.7	Oh, there's an all-in-one special offer.
	...

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