To date, not a single one of the things that they promised us at the time of making the investment has been fulfilled.
I hope the day comes when at least one is fulfilled
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Interesting thought here:
Portugal is one of the few European countries that allows an immigrant worker in an irregular situation to apply for a visa with the national authorities and these are the cases that are clogging up the system.
All you need is an address, tax number and an employment contract to apply, regardless of whether you entered as a tourist, a situation that has led to an exponential increase in irregular applications.
The new agency inherited 350,000 pending cases in October, the last time the figures were released.
To try to resolve the situation, the now outgoing government promised to invest in modernizing the IT system, with a portal already open to requests for the granting and renewal of residence permits, one of the SEFâs problems, which was unable to respond to requests made. and presented several structural problems.
Portugal has proven it can process visas as fast as it wantsâŠthat last word is critical, âwantsâ.
It wants to process D7/D8 visas quickly. It wants to process Ukrainian and Brazilian visas quickly.
What it doesnt want is to speed up the process that would allow you, a russian oligarch billionaire with dual citizenship on the moon, to remove your investment from the country. If GV applications take three years, thats just three more years of access to your money, for govt, lawyers, banks, etc.
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Caveat emptor applies everywhere at all times but I donât think you can suggest that complaints are unwarranted âwhiningâ. Portugal is a developed economy in the EU with significant bureaucratic oversight. They marketed these programs with the promise of certain legal protections, but their treatment of many individual investors has been pretty shoddy. It hardly âentitledâ to call that out. If anything, telling people to suck it up is just giving into the soft bigotry of low expectations.
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Weâre all tired of them posting on every single topic about how they are pissed because they donated money and havenât got their visa yet.
Itâs not our fault they picked a stupid investment and it gets tiresome for those of us that are here more often
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And all of us here need to be realistic about the downsides of a socialist country like Portugal. The people working at SEF (and now AIMA) have essentially ZERO incentive to work hard at processing our visas (or at anything else). They more than likely make a small salary, are almost impossible to fire, and get NO reward for working hard. Under those circumstances, which of us would do any differently? If you donât work reasonably hard in the USA, thereâs a nonzero chance you could lose your job, your healthcare, and your home, all in short order. Heck, you can work hard and STILL have all that happen!
Iâm pretty certain that the SEF/AIMA employee who will eventually get around to processing my GV application has nothing personal against me. Itâs just a simple fact that thereâs next-to-no downside to just looking at my application and then wondering how Benfica is going to do next weekend.
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Oh absolutely, donât get me started on the bad incentives for all sorts of things, and how the Portuguese government is fâ â â ing their citizens, I can go on at length
But thatâs not productive nor what weâre here for so I donât
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I donât find the complaints as irritating as you seem to. Itâs a long process, the bureaucracy sucks, and there are precious few places to vent. Maybe youâre just here too often Garrett 
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True, but where management needs to intervene.
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Complaints are fine as long as they are constructive and used sparingly, i.e. complain about something â ask for advice/guidance â take action â provide feedback.
But complaining about the same thing all over again multiple times a day on almost every live thread is irritating as hell.
If it goes on like this we will all end up being here less often 
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Haha, point taken.
Portugal is not a socialist country. Itâs a capitalist constitutional republic where one of the major parties are center-left social democrats.
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I am absolutely here too often, I will admit
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Nonetheless your contributions are appreciated, so thank you for your service 
My complaints have little to do with my chosen donation. I would be just as disgusted with how this program is run if I had purchased a dumpy house or made a bad investment in a hotel or PT-run fund.
I apologize to everyone for discussing the program as it has been delivered rather than designed and marketed. What else is there to discuss? There isnât really any good news coming, so would you have people stop discussing the program entirely?
more bad news about AIMA am I allowed to post about it? Can I only celebrate it? When good news happens, I will celebrate it, but this was a year full of bad news pretty exclusively.
I will also note it seems the people most vocal about negativity are the ones who have had already had progress in their application, like providing biometrics or even having cards in hand. The rich tutting the poor for complaining about hunger! 
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Also, others who may be looking at this forum deserve to hear the negative aspects as well. I wish there had been more of those posts/ voices when we started our process.
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Yes, absolutely. Think one of us should join every ârah, rahâ webinar/presentation out there to add a dose of reality
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I swear. I think the Sales Reps for this program just add to the problem when they falsely claim âwe expect the processing times to improve significantlyâ.
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From a GV applicant on another group:
â My lawyer said the visa processing will now be done by a private company and they have picked up the paceâ.
Anyone else hear this or is it just a lawyer reassuring the client!
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To my foreign and uneducated self, I would be surprised if Portugal was in the business of privatizing government entities, but maybe it is ok for them to subcontract out work they are terrible at?
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