Latvia's Golden Visa Fraud Investigation

Latvia’s financial intelligence service has thrillingly uncovered over 20 companies suspected of running fraudulent investment schemes through the country's golden visa program! 

Around 200 foreign nationals are believed to have poured over €10 million into share capital without backing any real business activity.

As reported by Latvian public broadcaster LSM’s investigative program De Facto, more than 50 of these investors have already snagged temporary residence permits (TRPs). Including their family members, the number of permit holders or applicants linked to these schemes has skyrocketed past 100!

Latvia Skyline

The money circle

Toms Platacis, the dynamic chief of Latvia’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), shared with De Facto that many investors didn’t make the required €50,000 contribution as a single, authentic investment. Instead, they cleverly paid it in repeated, circular amounts.

He vividly described one pattern: “ten thousand, paid five times in a circle.”

The FIU found that the money often boomeranged back to the scheme organizers through loans, fake transactions, or purchases of vehicles or real estate. In some instances, funds were transferred without any clear business purpose. 

Some investors were even told from the start that they wouldn’t receive dividends and couldn’t reclaim their money.

The companies under the lens

De Facto took a deep dive into several companies, but authorities haven’t officially found any guilty of misconduct yet.

One company, based in Portugal and founded about 18 months ago, attracted nine investors applying for TRPs. Its shareholder list is a vibrant mix of 30 individuals from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Chile, Malawi, Syria, Vanuatu, and more.

Each holds shares without voting rights. Data from the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (OCMA) revealed that this company had one of the highest investor rejection rates in the program. 

A company representative boasted to De Facto that the firm had been thriving in Portugal for nine years, managing a €200 million portfolio, but didn’t respond to follow-up questions.

Another intriguing case involved Roberts Stafeckis, who controlled several companies under the “Latvindia” group. Each company attracted the maximum number of permitted investors. Two of these companies reported no revenue and posted losses in 2024. 

A third group, linked to a businesswoman, included three companies with unpaid taxes. A lawyer for the group confidently told De Facto that if all legal requirements are met, “nothing more can be demanded of the company.”

Latvia

A wider pattern

The issues are spreading beyond the directly investigated companies.

Data from Lursoft shows that out of 78 companies attracting foreign investors over the past five years, seven have ceased operations, and about 20 have unpaid taxes.

Roughly half reported fewer than five employees, and only about half met the legal requirement to pay at least €40,000 in annual taxes.

The program has been around since 2010, initially bringing in over €1 billion in investment, mostly from Russian nationals.

The volume dipped after Latvia faced pressure to reform its non-resident banking sector and dropped again after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russian and Belarusian citizens can no longer apply.

Currently, the share capital route accounts for just 0.3% of total non-resident investment in Latvia’s economy.

A surge nobody expected

Despite its reduced role, the program has seen an unexpected surge in applications. In 2025, authorities received 109 applications, a whopping increase from the 20 filed in 2021! 

They approved 201 applications, up 34.9% from 2024. The top applicants hailed from Turkey (20%), Vietnam (11%), the UK (9%), and India (9%).

Security concerns have also escalated. Latvia’s State Security Service deputy head, Eriks Tsinkus, informed a parliamentary investigative commission that gathering reliable information on applicants from China, Central Asia, and Africa is challenging. 

He also noted a worrying trend: some individuals initially receiving TRPs as Russian citizens are now trying to renew them using Israeli passports, complicating the tracking of dual citizenship.

Ilze Briede, head of the OCMA’s Migration Department, stated that authorities face legal limitations.

“In our view, this criterion is currently insufficient,” she told the commission, referring to the difficulty in canceling a TRP from a company that pays taxes on paper but doesn’t conduct real business.

A system built to miss this

Europe’s new Entry/Exit System (EES), fully operational since April 10, 2026, and the upcoming European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS), set to launch in late 2026, were not crafted to tackle this issue—and the Latvia scandal highlights this gap.

Both systems focus on short-stay travelers. EES tracks non-EU nationals entering and leaving external borders for stays of up to 90 days, collecting biometric data like facial images and fingerprints.

ETIAS will require visa-exempt travelers to obtain approval before entering 30 European countries. Neither system applies to TRP holders, who are exempt from EES registration.

As a result, individuals who obtain fraudulent golden visas can travel across Europe without leaving the biometric record that EES creates for regular tourists from the same countries. The pattern Tsinkus described would only appear in EES records if they had entered the Schengen Area as short-term visitors, not as residence permit holders.

ETIAS may prevent some high-risk individuals before they reach the golden visa stage, since applicants from countries like Turkey, India, and Vietnam must pass pre-travel checks. However, once someone secures a TRP, that layer of screening no longer applies.

Parliament at standstill

Political pressure to shut down the program is mounting, but a decision before Latvia’s October elections seems unlikely.

Jānis Dombrava, head of the parliamentary investigative committee, labeled the program “a crude way to circumvent the system” and pushed for its closure. 

Ainars Latkovskis, chairman of the Saeima National Security Committee, stated that resolving the disagreement between the Ministries of Economy and Interior is tough under the current parliament.

The Ministry of Economics disagreed, claiming that authorities carefully screen investors and that the program contributes to the state budget. 

Māris Vainovskis, deputy chairman of the Foreign Investors’ Council of Latvia, summed up the issue at the commission: “Is our goal to issue a residence permit? Or is our goal to create an investment?”

The Saeima has already eliminated one option—the government securities route—which attracted only 88 investors over ten years. Whether the share capital route will also be removed depends on a political agreement that has not yet been reached.