DHAKA: Australia may ease rules on a visa scheme aimed at luring investment from wealthy Chinese to help clear a backlog of applications and in the wake of complaints that disclosure requirements are too strict.
Lawyers and migration agents said, reports The Straits Times.
The 18-month-old Significant Investor Visa scheme offers residency to overseas individuals who invest more than A$5 million in Australia under a program the government hopes will eventually raise A$6 billion a year.
More than 90 percent of applicants are from China.
Finding the right balance is a challenge for the government, said Jerry Gomez, a lawyer and registered migration agent, especially at a time when China has launched a sweeping crackdown on corruption that has among other things targeted officials who transfer ill-gotten gains offshore.
‘High net-worth individuals in China are very private in relation to their wealth,’ Rita Chowdhury, a member of the Law Council of Australia’s migration law committee told parliament.
‘They definitely have a lot of concerns about providing information about their financial circumstances to a government body. They also have suspicions that the Australian government could be passing that information to the Chinese government.’
Approvals for the visas have progressed at a snail’s pace.
By the end of June, just 286 visas had been approved compared with 1,497 ‘expressions of interest’, according to data from the Immigration Department.
BDST: 0157 HRS, AUG 08, 2014