Well in common law at least in the UK, this would be illegal. There was reasonable expectation that the Portuguese Golden Visa was intrinsically linked to Citizenship.
You’ve probably got your citizenship or you’re not a GV investor so that’s why you’re reveling in our misery but it’s okay Karma is real.
There are several reasons including fingerprints unreadable manually or electronically due to age and occupation that took several years to resolve through intercession of my member of Congress. I was finally able to get an updated criminal background history but not until this past November. (I still do not have readable fingerprints which would have been an ongoing issue when trying to renew a residence card in the future.) I had been advised by two Portuguese immigration attorneys that until I had an updated criminal history I would either lose the case in court, or AIMA would deny my visa.
Then by November there were tens of thousands of case already backlogged in the courts , and we still didn’t have any definitive answer as to when the 5 year clock would begin. If the law setting the date to application were set aside, I would leave Portugal even without the elements of the proposed new nationality law.
I will be 78 soon and if the system had worked as promised I would have been able to cash out my GV investment by June of 2028. At my age additional delay in accessing those funds was and is unacceptable. Leaving Portugal insures I will have my funds in 2028, they will be tax free in Portugal, I won’t have to pay for the first residence card and subsequent renewals, and I am still healthy enough to start over.
I still think I made a rational decision in the matter of a lawsuit, and I am ready to move on with my life elsewhere.
Interesting that you find it necessary to be nasty.
“Interesting that you find it necessary to be nasty. “
This comment was directed to sj-to-pt
Perhaps my comment would be called “nasty” as well, but weren’t there MI applications that got rejected because they were submitted without criminal background check (when applicants were rushing to submit before MI got cancelled)? In other words, not submitting all necessary documents was construed by AIMA as not submitting a complete application.
So even if the law were to stay the same, is your lawyer confident that your 5-year clock would have started in 2021, as opposed to Nov 2024?
Understandable. Sorry to hear of your difficulties. I hope you’re able to cut your losses without too much trouble
My comment wasn’t directed at you, FYI. Rather the other guy telling off other commenters
At what post? I didn’t see anyone showing off really and I am not a native speaker either.
I deleted some unproductive back and forth from this thread. Let’s try to keep this on topic.
Doesn’t the part of the opinion that basically says the start date of the five years being from the issue of the card is unconstitutional mean that the start period has to be from the date of application / payment. Feels like there may be grounds to sue. It’s a ways off for us, so I assume I would not be the first.
It seems the following will happen first:
So whatever law that is published will already be very constitutional—the constitutionality of not “starting the clock” of naturalisation from GV application would have already been ruled on. But someone might still sue due to extraordinary individual circumstances.
Maybe. They tend to pass laws and regulations without covering or considering all “use cases”. There’s also a lot of “clear expectations”, given that AIMA was supposed to adjudicate within 90 days not ~1000 in my case (or even more in others). I agree with you that we will find out when they pass the law, if this issue it is challenged and passes constitutional muster and if and when someone sues and wins judge lotto
We’ll see then. If you look at the court ruling from the previous changes to the Nationality Law (re Sephardic Jews), it addressed a lot of arguments and was pretty well reasoned, in line with the goal of avoiding unnecessary lawsuits.
No, you won’t be the only one. If they attempt this rug pull, I think my plan is to sue on the day I would have otherwise been eligible.