It has recently come into notice that Australia may be thinking to ease rules on a visa scheme directly targeting investment from Chinese Millionaires to help clear a backlog of applications. There is a significantly old Investor Visa Scheme, which offers residency to overseas individuals who invest more that A$5 million in Australia. Moreover, under this programme the government anticipates that it will in due course raise A$6 billion a year. What is surprising is that under this programme more than 90 percent of the applicants are from China. The Australian Government is eyeing Chinese big shots and therefore, easing out the Australia immigration process for applicants. This will enable the country to raise a lot of revenue and it will boost the economy, but the question that strikes my mind is why there is an urgent need of overseas revenue and that too from China.
High net-worth individuals in China are very private in relation to their total wealth, they will not invest in the programme until unless they are absolutely sure that they will get handsome returns. And this is exactly the problem that the Australian government is facing, the Chinese people have a lot of concerns about providing information about their financial status to the government, they suspect that the Australian government is leaking that information to the Chinese government. As evident, this is creating havoc in the immigration process, approval’s for visas are progressing at a snail’s pace, at least 20 percent of the applicants have either withdrawn or rejected, reason being want of more disclosures on the source of funding which the Australian government is not providing, there is no transparency.
Australia has declared it wants to speed up approvals and lawyers and agents expect to shed light on rules of source of funding by specifying time frame and proof to verify the money is clean. The new rules will probably be declared by November this year.
