I did some quick analysis of NG’s GV timeline tracker to back up my (second) letter to the President this morning.
I wanted to illustrate how it’s completely unfair to ignore our time in AIMA purgatory w.r.t. counting years for Citizenship, because as Sr. Miranda says that’s totally “arbitrary” and nothing we can control.
fwiw, my letter (translated w/Deepl)
Thank you for your reply of 22-October. As of today, it falls to your Excellency to protect the Portuguese Constitution, after the main political parties have forsaken it.
I and thousands of others have invested billions into Portugal through the Autorização de Residência para Investimento.
Any investment involves a “contract” and expectations that both sides will honour their original agreement. Now Portugal wants to retroactively double the years required for Nationality. How can any investor trust Portugal when we are cheated like this?
O “pai da Constituição” Jorge Miranda has also made it very clear that starting our count of years for Nationality from the date of our residency approval would be arbitrary and unconstitutional.
My own “90 day” approval process is still unconcluded after three years waiting on SEF/AIMA, through no fault of my own. I am an active member of an ARI investors forum, and in a survey of 349 people who actually received their residency we found that SEF/AIMA has huge variances in ARI approval durations:
- 9 applicants received their ARI residency approval in less than 1 year
- 98 waited up to 2 years
- 111 waited up to 3 years
- 126 waited up to 4 years
- 5 waited 4 years or more
In the context of requiring 5 - or now 10 - precious years to qualify for Nationality, you can see that most of us lose 1 to 4 years waiting on SEF/AIMA bureaucracy that is totally out of our control! How can Portugal penalise us for Portugal’s own inefficiency?
I plead with you to please instruct the Tribunal Constitucional to review the huge injustices in the Nationality Law amendments that you have been presented with.
EDIT: Argh! I forgot to point out (as Sr. Miranda did) that someone who applies the same time as me can take 1-2 years more or less than me to get AIMA approval, again proving how arbitrary “date of approval” is for counting years. Maybe someone else can note that in their letter!