Obtaining an alternate citizenship through Citizenship By Investment (CbI) has become a popular option for many individuals across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Russia. These areas are often brought with problems in conducting detailed due diligence. Do the jurisdictions providing CbI really know their applicants?
It is a complex subject and can be high risk for nations providing CbI. The potential for accepting individuals with dubious history, criminal concerns, and sanctions is a major concern for these nations that is not often managed by the network of agents providing services to assist applicants with the application process.
Our part of this process, generally engaged via the jurisdictions legal advisors, is to put a greater level of detail to the applicant’s information through a process of detailed due diligence within the applicants home-country and country of current residence.
What do we do?
The scope of our work will generally involve:
Verifications of identity and residence address
Verifications/assessment of ID documents
Verification and/or identification of any company ownership and registration
Volume of business carried out by company which is owned by the subject for at least the past two years (applicable only if subject owns company)
Main client(s) of the subject’s company (applicable only if subject owns company)
Verification of prior and current employment
Verification of educational degree
Verification of marriage
Verification of military service
Searches of all available legal records and sources to cover civil court proceedings, criminal arrests/convictions/court actions, bankruptcies
aIdentification of any tax or other legal issues with government agencies, and
Detailed searches of local news media searches for any significant or negative information.
The majority of cases are completed without any major concerns for our client but we have been successful in identifying individuals and linked family members with serious criminal history including organised crime, listed on sanctions and watch lists, financial crime, derogatory reporting within the media and local social media, political problems and a host of unreported details including links to sanctioned business and government agencies.
Our process has been proven over the past two decades and has become more efficient providing timely reports allowing a period for assessment and followup by the client before deciding whether the individual/ family requires further scrutiny.
Testimonal: "...we were really impressed with the Lituev reports, and appreciated all the work that went into these. Really great reports. Thank you again." MH, USA.