PGV / ARI Rage, Tragedy, & General Madness

Residencies & citizenships Portugal Golden Visa 🇵🇹
1

We invested in Portugal to give our families and ourselves a better life. Our investment benefits every sector of the Portuguese economy. We are law-abiding citizens who have passed every background check.

Yet:
(1) The former PM slandered the few of us as having increased the entire nation’s housing prices;
(2) The public resents us;
(3) The current government takes no responsibility for past promises, and wants to change the regulations to disfavor us;
(4) The EU is pressuring Portugal to eliminate our program, and Schengen is disintegrating;
(5) AIMA / SEF processes the other 400,000 applications ahead of ours, even those who applied after us;
(6) The courts are so clogged that many judges are disregarding our rights because they don’t consider our cases urgent enough;
(7) Still no clarity on when we can apply for citizenship.

We have not received what we paid for. Our money remains inaccessible or in some cases, is already gone.

We are responsible people in the hands of a system that takes no responsibility. We are planners, but our life plans remain in limbo as the years tick away. We are people of action, but now many of us have no action item but to wait.

Understandably, we are angry. We are frustrated. We are deeply concerned. We have been venting and arguing in this forum on other topics that some would prefer to be purely process-oriented.

So, here is a topic for all your inconvenient, unpleasant, negative PGV / ARI experiences and feelings. It may be off-topic everywhere else, but it’s on-topic here. Let it flow!!!

EDIT: should be more like “group therapy” than “saying stuff that would put us on a watch list” :sweat_smile:

13 Likes
2

Everyone other post in every other topic could easily fall under the category of " Rage, Tragedy, & General Madness". Is another topic devoted to this really necessary? When there is so much constant negativity it tends to discourage participation by constructive contributors.

2 Likes
3

Counterpoint - if all the rage-posting could be channeled here, we could keep the other topics clear for the exchange of useful information

12 Likes
4

Agreed. Better to have a dedicated space for it as it tends to run every other thread off the rails otherwise.

Feel free to flag these kinds of posts in other threads as “off topic” so they can be moved here.

6 Likes
5

Denying people the opportunity to talk about the losses they have suffered only makes it worse.

Many of us are under pressure or facing judgment from our families or friends over the failure of our investments in this program to yield the necessary results, so where else are we supposed to go to talk about it?

If you don’t like it, feel free to ignore this topic.

8 Likes
6
2 Likes
7

Careful op, you dont want to get labeled a dis-fud-er of the peace.

8

monty python GIF

3 Likes
9

Ok, I prefer to look on the brighter side. The GV essentially provides the benefits I wanted. i.e. Starting the clock on residency in Portugal without actually living there. And if I wanted to move to Portugal tomorrow, I could. It hasn’t been a smooth ride, but it is progressing.

5 Likes
10

Many applicants from non-visa-free countries were hoping to use PGV as an entry point to Schengen, but accessing the rest of Schengen isn’t feasible without the residence card.

1 Like
11

Definitely need a place to vent. When I did my biometrics in Portimao, the lady there treated me like an unwanted asylum seeker, not a rich person who has invested 400,000 Euro’s in funds which build hospitals and student accommodation and do NOTHING to raise house prices. I waited over 6 months from that meeting to my residency card - only to get a paltry 1 year visa out of it. Now I have no idea if I will be able to easily extend. When I went into this, I was told it was a well organised system and if you followed the rules, you would get citizenship at the end of it…there have certainly been periods of the last few years when I no longer even WANTED to be a citizen of such a disfunctional country! However, last trip to Portugal was lovely and cross fingers the worst is behind us. Now signed up to learn Portuguese at the local university - perhaps that will endear us more to the locals.

7 Likes
12

So she treated you better than the rest of us PGV / ARI investors? :wink:

3 Likes
14

You applied in 2016. I believe that you have already completed 5 years GV up to now. Have you applied for citizenship ?

15

Been waiting almost 2 years for PRE-approval. Gotten nothing I bargained for and no light on the horizon. It’s a pure wealth transfer from scammed foreign nationals to the Portuguese government, the “professionals” that sold us this fraud, and the private sector sellers/corporations that sold us the investments. We have very little recourse and everyone knows it. It’s an ongoing debacle, crime, and shame. Shame on you Portugal! I hope justice comes for you somehow.

5 Likes
16

I second that.

2 Likes
17

Some rough numbers for those of us waiting our lives away: All the judges working together over 45 days processed 1,359 cases, which works out to 30.2 cases per day. However, a backlog of 20,000 summons remains, which at this pace would take 662 days (1.81 years) to resolve. These are just the court cases.

Judges clear 1,359 immigration cases during holidays - The Portugal News

Regarding the “new immigrant center”, the processing rate is 240 people per day with a backlog of 400,000 cases so this works out to 1,667 days. To convert into years, here it appears the “per day” refers to business days rather than calendar days, so at ~250 business days per year, that’s 6.67 years to clear the backlog.

New immigrant centre processing 240 people per day - The Portugal News

So, with the following assumptions and caveats below, we may be able to roughly assume that at this pace, if you file a lawsuit now, you’ll be waiting on average 1.81 years for your case to clear, while if you don’t, you’ll be waiting 6.67 years for AIMA to process you.

Assumptions required for the above to be true:
(1) Judges process immigration lawsuits at the same rate during the non-holiday period as during the holiday period. Could go either way – processing may speed up during regular non-holiday times, but it’s also possible that judges may have other responsibilities during non-holiday times that divide their time vs. the holiday when their plate was clear to focus on immigration application cases.
(2) AIMA/SEF isn’t processing on any cases that aren’t related to lawsuits except using the “new immigrant centre” – anecdotally, there may be a tiny trickle of cases outside this, but very few, so thsi should basically be true.
(3) The 240 per day number for the “new immigrant centre” will not increase in the future – the government does mention that it intends to increase processing capacity, though whether this increase will be feasible remains to be seen.
(4) Without a lawsuit, PGV / ARI cases are processed last by AIMA and need to wait for the entire existing backlog to be resolved before processing – we know this is generally true, though sometimes AIMA takes one of our cases out of the drawer for unknown reasons. Maybe pessimistic.
(5) Currently active PGV / ARI cases will be processed ahead of all new applications received after today – maybe optimistic.

Probably there are more angles from which to critique these numbers and logic, both pessimistically and optimistically, but at least this gives us an indication of current pace.

3 Likes
18

Doubtful, annual statistics show around a thousand ARIs approved every year basically since the program started. So I guess there are a select few AIMA employees who know how to process ARIs and process them in parallel with everything else.

The problem is that this number is never changed in response to number of applications. So any year with more than a thousand applicants, the backlog grows.

1 Like
19

In the case of your theory, assuming the information in the article below is correct, the result would be similar or even a bit worse.

Portugal’s €4bn Golden Visa Backlog Would Take Until 2030 to Finish Processing, Insider Reveals - IMI - Investment Migration Insider (imidaily.com)

20

Thanks for sharing all your experiences. I started looking into the program a month ago, now I am not sure if it is still worth it invest 500000 euros at this point into the program with so many unknowns.

3 Likes
21

Comes back to what you really want:

2 Likes