Can you dispose your investment before you get your permanent residence permit if 5 years have already passed since your initial investment (thanks to slow as hell SEF/AIMA)? Since the April change only applies to citizenship, if I do not try to obtain citizenship, do I have to go through the whole 2+2+1 process to get permanent residency from the initial granting of the very first golden visa ? Is there a way to downgrade citizenship to permanent residency? (China doesn’t allow dual citizenship so I can’t legally have both)
Hey einportugal, I asked the lawyers I am working with about this (but for citizenship) and they said that as long as you are maintaining “residency” with a GV you need to hold the investment. However, once you get the PR (or citizenship) you can sell the investment at any time. With the recent law change, the clock has already started ticking for getting your PR (or citizenship), so you would not need to hold the GV (and investment) for five additional years after first getting the GV card–you just need to hold it long enough to fulfill the 5 years since your application, apply for the PR, and receive that. For safety sake I’d just plan on holding everything until the PR card is in your hands.
I don’t think that’s right in relation to permanent residence. The recent changes to the Nationality Law have nothing to say about PR - only naturalisation - so the five year clock for PR remains from the date of your first ARI card.
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Thanks for the reply McLarge! Did your lawyer say the new law applies to PR as well? Only citizenship is mentioned in its wording.
cj807 may be correct, this is in relation to naturalization–I haven’t asked directly about the PR related to the new law.
Our attorney has advised us that the new law regarding time-line for citizenship only applies to citizenship and that the law concerning permanent residency is separate. She told us that the clock does not start toward permanent residency until the little plastic white temporary residency card is in your hands. We’re still waiting after two years and five months since our investment, and over a year since our biometrics appointment, for our cards.
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Thanks! It is crazy how now it is easier to become a citizen than a permanent resident!
The citizenship backlog is around three years according to my attorney, and may grow longer with the huge backlog of residence applications currently in process, so wouldn’t exactly call it “easy”.
I joined this group after seeing your question because my husband and I are GV holders, desperate to sell our investment property, and I have a lot of pretty bad news for you.
We started the GV process in 2016, with the promise that we could sell our investment property after the 5 year GV program ended by either getting Portuguese Permanent Residency or Citizenship. Our final renewal ended after 7 years because of the long approval wait times. In 2022, excited that we could finally sell our property, we decided to apply for Perm Residency before Citizenship, thinking the process would be faster. I noticed that there was a new type of Permanent Residency, GV Permanent Residency, in addition to “regular” Permanent Residency, costing about 20 times more (I am serious!) This was completely new - added in 2022, so even the lawyers I spoke to didn’t quite know what to make of it. We wanted to apply for Regular Permanent Residency (not GV) because it was much cheaper and we met all of the legal requirements. We started the process with our attorney, but that is when the SEF flood gates opened and we haven’t been able to get an appointment since then.
The very bad news: in the two years that we have been waiting for an appointment, those GV holders who did get appointments with SEF/AIMA and tried for “regular” permanent residency have been told by SEF/ AIMA that their only option is GV Permanent Residency - even if they meet the “stay” requirement for Regular Permanent Residency. My lawyer, and many, many others, now confirm that GV Permanent Residency is our only Permanent Residence option. The only alternative until we have Citizenship (which we have since applied for) is to get another 2 GV Temp Residency when the June 30, 2025 validity extension ends.
It gets worse: You won’t believe this but with GV Permanent Residency, you can’t sell your investment property!!! My attorney has verified this. The law states that you must keep your investment for as long as you are in the GV program, and GV Perm Residency extends this period. How is the possible?! At least my husband and I can wait for Citizenship and finally sell our investment property, but what will people like you, who don’t want Citizenship do? If anyone knows a GV holder who has been able to get REGULAR permanent residency after 2022 please respond to this post.
There are literally thousands and thousands of GV holders like us who entered into an agreement with Portugal under the condition that we could sell our investment property after 5 years. We have held up our part of the deal and they have not honored their part. They have changed the GV conditions and costs dramatically since we entered the program. All we ask is that we get what we were promised - nothing more. Our choices at this point are to wait for something to change for the better (unlikely), or start from scratch somewhere else.
If anyone is aware of a class-action lawsuit for GV holders, please respond to this post. It may be the only way for all of us to get the resolution we need.
Sorry for the lengthly reply, but it took us a LONG time to get all of this information and I wanted to spare you the same effort.
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Laura, thanks for this update, and sorry for your hardship.
For the rest of us, this is just another example of Portgual’s lack of credibility. Some of us who applied in the 2020s may have admonished ourselves: “I’m only in this mess because I took too long. If only I had started earlier!..”
Well, now we know better. Unless you invested in 2012-2013, then you’re in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to PR or citizenship.
More broadly, the lesson I take from this is:
(1) The more popular the program, the more likely it will devolve into a mess (Cyprus’s old CBI program, MM2H in Malaysia are other examples of this).
(2) For any program, the longer the timeline until PR or citizenship, the more likely the government will change the rules on you midway through.
Not sure if you are updated with the GV renewal. Now GV cards are switched to D2 visa and the renewal fee is 177Euros only. I am not sure how much it costs for GV PR.
To sell the property, i think only 02 ways you can do it. 1) wait until you get citizenship 2) go to sef to cancel your GV and sell property, then re-apply D7.
Thanks so much for your reply. I know they were initially going to switch GVs to D2s when they had decided to cancel GVS all together. Since they decided to keep GVs, except for the investment option, it is my understanding that you have to continue to renew your GV util you have citizenship. I have asked two attorneys about this, but I will ask again - thanks!
hm. Ok. There’s no accounting for regulations in actual application vs what the law says. I’ll just delete that other post. I might ask the lawyers how they got from A to B, but I guess in truth I don’t care
Very well put Jeff! The problem for us is that Portugal is our home and has been for over 7 years, complete with big old Portuguese dog. We don’t want to live anywhere else and we can’t risk living here illegally while waiting for our Citizenship (applications submitted 1.5 years ago and only registers as “received”.) We just really need to dump the investment investment property!! I have a friend in the US who has also applied for citizenship. We have the same attorney. While I need to renew my GV, she is selling her investment property, letting Visa expire, an will move to Portugal once Citizenship is approved. Pretty much just as you said. We will eventually be okay. I just feel really terrible for the original poster who can’t have dual citizenship (like so many others) and was counting on Permanent Residency in order to sell her investment.
Thanks SO much for the link to Path to Citizenship. Super helpful to read all the posts.
Well that’s some f’ing BS, locking up peoples’ funds way longer than expected. I’m not sure what it means for investment fund folks like myself, given the funds we invested in were never meant to be open ended funds. Will the firms have to extend them indefinitely? Will we have to re-invest again mid process? The lack of competence and direction is infuriating.
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I don’t think the funds as structured in PT are ever “open-ended”, they have durations, I think it’s a matter of structure. You just have a shareholder meeting and change the bylaws to extend. Or the mgmt company just registers another fund and rolls the shares.
I don’t think the fund paperwork mechanics are a big deal.
What is a bigger deal is that the fund manager now has to figure out what to do with the money for a longer period than they intended, with a huge variability on when people will need to exit (and thus when to liquidate). From the investment manager’s POV, this is a nightmare. Say, for example, you invested in several building projects. You expected them to be done in 4-5 years. You had a timeline in to raise cash, a building period, then you sell the buildings once complete. All planned out. Oops. Now people have to hang around for 7 years. Errr… what do I do with the money for another 2 years? Stuff it in a bank at 3%? Start another project? But hey, some of the people MIGHT actually have done magic and gotten their passport in 6 years. Some were screwed by AIMA and will be in for 9. But none of these people really know. So when do they want out? Do I make another big building project and make everyone wait 9 years? Who am I going to piss off in doing so? OK, I can’t answer the question well, so instead I’ll sit on the cash and make 2%. I have to still pay all my employees, so I still need to take 1% or whatever. The investors are still just as pissed off.
Oh and meanwhile the entire industry’s in an uproar, it’s harder to get investors because they’re all going to this NomadGate place and hearing all this bad shit and steering away…my employees are wondering about the future of their job…
(Let’s just assume for a moment that the fund manager does, actually, care about doing a good job. Some actually do, after all.)
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If people just roll their funds into IMGA seems they should qualify via “investing in the same category”
Now if you’re a Mercan investor you’re more screwed because you have to move your money to another property renovation…
Yeah, rolling to IMGA should be fine. The only issue is whether SEF/AIMA puts up a fuss over the changed paperwork and it puts you into another version of paperwork hell or not. No one’s wanted to try that to my knowledge?