07
May 2026
Latvia’s financial intelligence service has flagged more than 20 companies suspected of running fake investment schemes under the country’s golden visa program.
Around 200 foreign nationals allegedly invested over €10 million in share capital that did not support any real business activity.
The investigation, first reported by Latvian public broadcaster LSM’s investigative program De Facto, found that more than 50 of these investors have already received temporary residence permits (TRPs).
When their family members are included, the total number of permit holders or applicants linked to these schemes rises to over 100.
The money circle
Latvia’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) chief, Toms Platacis, told De Facto that in several cases, investors did not make the required €50,000 contribution as a single, genuine investment. Instead, they paid it in repeated, circular amounts.
He described one pattern clearly: “ten thousand, paid five times in a circle.”
The FIU found that the money often flowed back to the scheme organizers through loans, fake transactions, or purchases of vehicles or real estate. In some cases, funds moved through transfers with no clear business purpose.
Some investors were even told from the start that they would not earn dividends and could not get their money back.
The companies under the lens
De Facto reviewed several companies, but authorities have not formally found any of them guilty of wrongdoing.
One company, based in Portugal and founded about 18 months ago, attracted nine investors applying for TRPs. Its shareholder list includes 30 individuals from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Chile, Malawi, Syria, Vanuatu, and other countries.
Each holds shares without voting rights. Data from the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (OCMA) showed that this company had one of the highest investor rejection rates in the program.
A company representative told De Facto that the firm had operated in Portugal for nine years and managed a €200 million portfolio, but did not reply to follow-up questions.
Another case involved Roberts Stafeckis, who controlled several companies under the “Latvindia” group. Each company attracted the maximum number of allowed investors. Two of these companies reported no revenue and posted losses in 2024.
A third group, linked to one businesswoman, included three companies with unpaid taxes. A lawyer for the group told De Facto that if all legal requirements are met, “nothing more can be demanded of the company.”
(Image courtesy of Radila Radilova via iStock)
A wider pattern
The issues go beyond the companies under direct investigation.
Data from Lursoft shows that out of 78 companies that attracted foreign investors over the past five years, seven have stopped operating. Around 20 have unpaid taxes.
About half reported fewer than five employees, and only about half met the legal requirement to pay at least €40,000 in annual taxes.
The program has been in place since 2010. In its first four years, it brought in over €1 billion in investment, mostly from Russian nationals.
The volume dropped after Latvia faced pressure to reform its non-resident banking sector and fell again after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russian and Belarusian citizens can no longer apply.
Today, the share capital route makes up just 0.3% of total non-resident investment in Latvia’s economy.
A surge nobody expected
Even with its smaller role, the program has seen a strong rise in applications. In 2025, authorities received 109 applications, more than five times the 20 filed in 2021.
They approved 201 applications, up 34.9% from 2024. The top applicants came from Turkey (20%), Vietnam (11%), the UK (9%), and India (9%).
Security concerns have also increased. Latvia’s State Security Service deputy head, Eriks Tsinkus, told a parliamentary investigative commission that it is difficult to gather reliable information on applicants from China, Central Asia, and Africa.
He also pointed to a concerning trend: some individuals who first received TRPs as Russian citizens are now trying to renew them using Israeli passports, making dual citizenship harder to track.
Ilze Briede, head of the OCMA’s Migration Department, said that authorities face limits under the law.
“In our view, this criterion is currently insufficient,” she told the commission, referring to how hard it is to cancel a TRP from a company that pays taxes on paper but does not run a real business.
(Image courtesy of AlbertPego via iStock)
A system built to miss this
Europe’s new Entry/Exit System (EES), fully operational since April 10, 2026, and the upcoming European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS), set to launch in the last quarter of 2026, were not designed to address this issue—and the Latvia scandal makes that gap more clear.
Both systems focus on short-stay travelers. EES tracks non-EU nationals entering and leaving external borders for stays of up to 90 days, collecting biometric data such as facial images and fingerprints.
ETIAS will require visa-exempt travelers to get approval before entering 30 European countries. Neither system applies to TRP holders, who are exempt from EES registration.
Because of this, people who obtain fraudulent golden visas can move across Europe without leaving the biometric record that EES creates for regular tourists from the same countries. The pattern Tsinkus described would only show up in EES records if they had entered the Schengen Area as short-term visitors, not as residence permit holders.
ETIAS may stop some high-risk individuals before they reach the golden visa stage, since applicants from countries like Turkey, India, and Vietnam must pass pre-travel checks. But once someone secures a TRP, that layer of screening no longer applies.
Parliament at standstill
Political pressure to shut down the program is growing, but a decision before Latvia’s October elections is unlikely.
Jānis Dombrava, head of the parliamentary investigative committee, called the program “a crude way to circumvent the system” and pushed for it to be closed.
Ainars Latkovskis, chairman of the Saeima National Security Committee, said that the disagreement between the Ministries of Economy and Interior is hard to resolve under the current parliament.
The Ministry of Economics disagreed. It said that authorities screen investors carefully and that the program brings money into the state budget.
Māris Vainovskis, deputy chairman of the Foreign Investors’ Council of Latvia, summed up the issue at the commission: “Is our goal to issue a residence permit? Or is our goal to create an investment?”
The Saeima has already removed one option—the government securities route—which attracted only 88 investors over ten years. Whether the share capital route will also be removed depends on a political agreement that has not yet been reached.
