Hello everyone, I am Victor Aguilar and sitting right next to me are Harpa Arnardzdotter and our guest, Rosie B.

We're in for an extremely exciting episode. A couple of weeks ago, the European Commission

released a report on investor citizenship and residence schemes in the European Union,

known popularly by their more polemic, much cooler, mouth-watering media-given nickname of Golden Visas.

Now, the EU is worried about these schemes, and so is more than one member state,

albeit for different reasons, and we'll tell you all about it.

This means we're going to be talking about citizenship, gold, money, investment, sovereignty,

money, laundering, tax evasion, crime, more money, power, corruption, money and law.

That's all?

In short, it's the perfect recipe for a spicy episode of EU Untangled.

Ah, saucy. You may remember the all-popular saying that there are things that you cannot buy.

Friendship, experiences, memories, love, happiness.

Well, turns out there is one thing you can actually buy,

and that is EU citizenship. So I guess MasterCard can add that to their problems. But let's start

at the beginning. What the heck is going on? Well, let's say in the 1980s, we started to see a

practice in the world. It started in the Caribbean where countries wanted to attract investors by selling them essentially citizenship.

So in exchange for money or some kind of an investment in their country, you would get a passport.

Now, this started apparently in 1984 in St. Kitts and Nevis.

Fast forward to the financial crisis of 2008, and this started to become a widespread common practice in the EU. So today you have about

20 EU member states that have a program where investors essentially put some kind of money or do some kind of an investment

in their government, their economy. And for exchange, you can either get a visa and citizenship,

full-blown citizenship, or you can get a permanent residency permit. And now the EU is saying

...