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Skills Shortage - North West premier hits out at municipalities’ audit reports

by admin,  Mar 13 2013 11:23 AM

THE financial audit reports of most of the North West’s municipalities are unacceptable, Premier Thandi Modise said on Friday.

 

"Most municipalities did not even bother to submit their financials to the auditor-general in time," Ms Modise said in her state of the province address in Mahikeng. "This situation cannot be tolerated. We must act and act decisively."

 

She said municipalities had to employ qualified and skilled staff to overcome service-delivery problems.

 

To address the skills shortage, the provincial government is working with the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, North West University and the Thuthuka Project, which focuses on education development, to sponsor students for accounting and finance management degrees.

 

"Upon completion, these students would be deployed to municipalities that experience a shortage of skills, especially in the field of finance," the premier said.

 

Earlier, Ms Modise said two North West agricultural colleges — in Taung and Potchefstroom — would be refurbished. A contractor was already on site working on structural defects.

 

This followed media reports that criticised the condition of the facilities at the Potchefstroom College of Agriculture.

 

Ms Modise said: "There is no need for people to sweat and misrepresent us on this matter."

 

She also announced the launch of the Kgora Resource Training centre at Ramatlabama, which would equip aspiring farmers with practical knowledge.

 

The North West government should seek to make its agricultural learning and training facilities the best in the country, Ms Modise said.

 

Courtesy of the Business Day

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Liberia ex-first lady proposes anti-gay bill

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 18:23 PM

Former Liberian first lady Jewel Howard Taylor has introduced a bill for homosexuality to be made a first degree felony, amid a raging debate over gay rights in the country, a lawmaker said Wednesday.

 

The bill submitted by former president Charles Taylor's ex-wife, now a senator, also seeks to amend laws to prohibit gay marriage.

 

"No two persons of the same sex shall have sexual relations. A violation of this prohibition will be considered a first degree felony," reads the proposed amendment.

 

Sodomy is already a criminal offence in the west African country.

 

George Tengbeh, a senator supporting the bill, said he hoped it would put an end to months of acrimonious public debate on gay rights.

 

It aims "to prevent the parliament from talking about such an issue that is against our tradition and culture," he told AFP.

 

The issue has been in the headlines this year as a group of activists in the country began lobbying for a bill legalising same-sex marriage.

 

This created a furore in the country whose President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

 

The information ministry released a statement on January 26 saying: "The Liberian government will not allow the legalisation of gay and lesbian activities in Liberia. The president has vowed not to allow such a bill, and even if the bill goes before the president she will veto it."

 

Gay rights in Africa have been in the spotlight since the United States and Britain have threatened to condition aid on enhanced rights for homosexuals.

 

"The first time we heard about it was at the AU (African Union) summit when the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appealed to African leaders to endorse gay rights," Tengbeh said.

 

"We came up to say that it's not suitable for us because our tradition does not allow such things to happen," he said.

 

Courtesy of the New Age

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Poor maths results hamper engineering sector, says recruitment firm

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 18:22 PM

 

Fewer than 105 000 matriculants out of the 496 000 who sat for their final exams in 2011 are able to pursue studies in engineering this year.

 

This poor result tightens the skills stranglehold that has gripped South Africa’s engineering sector in recent years and paints a bleak picture for companies looking to fill learnership programmes in the years ahead, reports Network Engineering, a specialist division of recruitment agency Network Recruitment.

 

Branch manager Marna Thompson says the Department of Basic Education’s 2011 technical report shows that only 104 033 matrics passed maths last year – just 46.3% of those that wrote the exam. The report also shows that not only has the number of matrics writing maths steadily declined since 2008, but the number of learners passing the subject has dropped too – by more than 30 000 learners over the past four years.

 

“Maths is significant for careers in the scientific, medical and engineering fraternities – all sectors where South Africa has historically had a skills shortage. But instead of growing the numbers of learners that are able to go to university and pursue studies in these faculties, we are increasingly losing learners. This does not bode well for the future of this sector, particularly the upskilling of learners through apprenticeship or learnership programmes,” Thompson explains.

 

The engineering sector and, specifically, the local mining industry have long been plagued by limited numbers of people entering and successfully completing industry learnerships. While Network Engineering previously only focused on placing qualified engineers, it has increasingly had to broaden its scope to include placing students in learnerships as well.

 

“Companies in this sector have an obligation to tackle the skills shortage by establishing learnerships and apprenticeships. But the current skills scarcities often mean these companies do not have the internal capacity to institute such programmes or recruit the learners they need to fill them. We assist by guiding clients in developing new learnerships and/or locating the right learners for the programme,” Thompson adds.

 

Network’s services include assessing the client’s needs in terms of the learnership; locating the ideal learners for the programme; determining a pricing structure for the candidates; placing the candidates; and facilitating the on-boarding process. All this ensures that suitable learners are placed within the correct programmes.

 

“This is particularly important now, given the diminishing pool of students companies have to choose from – a trend that seems set to continue if the matric results are anything to go by. Ultimately, more emphasis has to be placed on learners taking maths at school level, followed by increased support at tertiary level, including during the learnership or apprenticeship. That would be a good start to dealing with the sector’s skills shortcomings,” Thompson concludes.

 

Courtesy of Engineering News

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More Greeks move to CT

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 17:22 PM

The Greek Consulate in Cape Town on Thursday said it was noticing an increase in the number of Greek nationals showing interest in South Africa.

 

Debt-strapped Greece has been in the grips of a severe financial crisis and violent protests.

 

Cape Town Consul-General Konstantinos Soulios said some 5,000 of his countrymen live in the Mother City.

 

However, he said it was difficult for Greeks to obtain work permits.

 

“You need to organise your trip from Greece, get the working visa and the come to South Africa to work. It is not that easy to get the permit.”

 

Courtesy Eye Witness News

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166,000 migrants find jobs; 166,000 Britons lose them

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 17:21 PM

The number of British citizens in employment over the past year fell by 166,000, while the number of non-British with jobs in the same period rose by the same amount: 166,000.

 

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed 48,000 had become unemployed in the last quarter, bringing the total national unemployment rate to 8.4%. That is the highest level in 16 years, with 2.67 million people out of work.

 

South Africa’s unemployment, by comparison, currently stands at 23.9%.

 

The ONS report warned, ‘These statistics have sometimes been incorrectly interpreted as indicating the proportion of new jobs that are taken by foreign migrants.’

 

These figures will no doubt cause many migrants to worry about a crackdown on them and their jobs, after UK Immigration Minister Damian Green proposed a £31,000 earning minimum for all immigrants. Catherine Maclay of Platt & Associates told TheSouthAfrican.com although they are only proposals, “The UK government is quite serious about sticking to its election promises to reduce net migration.”

 

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the think tank Migrationwatch, told the Daily Mail the increase in foreign-born workers was ‘quite extraordinary’.

 

He said, “Given the continued increase in the number of British workers who are unemployed, it seems quite extraordinary that some employers are still employing agencies to recruit workers from overseas.”

 

Employment rate for the three months to December 2011 stand at 26.61 million for British workers and 2.58 million for non-Brits.

 

Women and young workers are still the hardest hit, with nearly a million women out of work and 250,000 16 to 24-year-olds unemployed for more than a year.

 

Courtesy, The South Africa.com

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SOUTH AFRICA: Migrants face unlawful arrests and hasty deportations

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 17:19 PM

MUSINA, 14 February 2012 (IRIN) - Four months ago, Clemence Uzizo, 21, a welder living in Soweto, Johannesburg's most populous suburb, made the mistake of venturing out to a local shop without his asylum-seeker permit. Neither the police who arrested him, nor the immigration officials who detained him, verified Uzizo's legal status before deporting him to Zimbabwe, the country of his birth.

 

"My permit was at home but I didn't have a cell phone to call to ask someone to bring it," he told IRIN not long after making a risky and expensive return to South Africa via the Limpopo River. "Since my father brought me [to South Africa] in 1992 I've lived here, so I don't know anyone in Zimbabwe."

 

Uzizo's story is not unusual. In October 2011 South Africa lifted a moratorium that had protected undocumented Zimbabweans from arrest and deportation for more than two years. Since then nearly 10,000 have been forcibly returned, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which runs a reception and support centre for returnees at the Beitbridge border between the two countries.

 

An internal directive issued by the Director-General of South Africa's Department of Home Affairs said deportation should only be carried out after verifying that a suspect had not applied for asylum or any other permits. However, Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh, who heads the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), said officials at Lindela Repatriation Centre outside Johannesburg, where the vast majority of migrants are held before being deported, often fail to screen new arrivals to establish that they really are undocumented.

 

"We find people with documents who shouldn't have been admitted [to Lindela]," she told IRIN. "It is a huge struggle to have [them] released; we usually have to resort to high court litigation which is time consuming and we can only assist a few people."

 

In a recent submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, LHR noted that "Despite the legal protections afforded to asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants in South Africa, the detention and deportation of foreign nationals is often carried out in an unlawful manner."

 

Arrest first, ask questions later

 

In the busy border town of Musina, about 10km south of Beitbridge, newly arrived migrants, many of them border jumpers like Uzizo, sleep rough in the vicinity of the Refugee Reception Office where they start queuing in the early hours of the morning in the hope of securing asylum-seeker permits. Despite waiting all day, not all of them reach the front of the queue and those who leave without documents risk arrest by police waiting outside, according to Jacob Matakanye, director of the Musina Legal Advice Office (MLAO).

 

On a recent Friday, three cells at Musina Police Station contained 106 migrants, of which 102 were men held in just two cells. Among them were Zimbabweans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Bangladeshis, Congolese and one Tanzanian, Cassim Mustapha, who had attempted to enter the country via the Beitbridge border post. "I'm claiming asylum because of my sexuality," he told IRIN. "I had a paper from the UN but they just said, 'Where is your passport?' and when I didn't have it, they arrested me."

 

Arresting someone who is claiming asylum because they cannot produce a passport is "completely unlawful", said Ramjathan-Keogh of LHR, but "quite common" at Beitbridge.

 

While the practice of arresting undocumented migrants first and asking questions later appears common in Musina, several organizations, including LHR, IOM and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) have regular access to detainees at the police station and often help secure the release of those with pending asylum applications or lost permits.

 

Access to detainees at Lindela is much more limited. The South African Human Rights Commission is the only organization with an official mandate to monitor immigration detention facilities, but according to LHR, such monitoring has been "haphazard and infrequent".

 

"We rely on clients to tell us who is there and what is going on. It's extremely laborious and frustrating," said Ramjathan-Keogh, adding that the organization was being forced to scale back its assistance to detainees at Lindela due to resource constraints.

 

Poor conditions

 

LHR's submission to the Special Rapporteur notes that detainees at Lindela regularly complain about conditions at the facility, in particular the lack of medical care, but also dirty bedding, inadequate meals, and beatings by security guards and immigration officials.

 

South Africa's immigration law stipulates that detention for the purpose of deportation should not exceed 120 days, but a number of detainees told LHR that they had been at Lindela much longer.

 

The cells at the Musina Police Station are often overcrowded, so deportations to Zimbabwe occur almost every day and detainees from further afield usually spend no more than two weeks there, according to Matakanye of MLAO. The downside of migrants being detained so briefly is that some are deported before agencies like LHR can determine the lawfulness of their case, said Ramjathan-Keogh, noting that there had been several instances of unaccompanied minors being deported from Musina.

 

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has expressed concern about conditions in the police cells, in particular the lack of access to health care and the absence of screening to determine which detainees are on medication for infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB) or HIV. "There's still no screening happening," said Christine Mwongera, MSF's project coordinator in Musina, "so there are TB patients being kept in cells with others."

 

Migrants with TB whose treatment is interrupted can develop multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains of the disease. Mwongera noted that "At some point, these people who are being deported might return and they will bring MDR-TB back to South Africa, so it really needs to be deal with."

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Nine Mozambican illegal immigrants fined

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 17:18 PM

Nine Mozambicans who were arrested for attempting to cross into South Africa illegally through the Beit Bridge border post, were each sentenced to a fine of US$20 or 30 days in jail.

 

Samba Sithole (27), Itai Mtisi (20), Nesbert Gwenzi (22), Justin Beukwa (24), Samson Gwenzi (54), Hardlife Makhuyana (24), Lincon Mubvumbi (30), Bongani Mulambo (25) and Lovemore Mulambo (20), all from the Chipangabera area in Mozambique, were convicted of contravening a section of the Immigration Act by a local magistrate, Mr Carrington Karidzagundi.

 

The prosecutor, Mr Marvelous Chikomo, said the nine Mozambicans used undesignated entry points along the Limpopo River in January to cross into South Africa illegally. The court heard that on 3 February, they arrived at the Beit Bridge Border Post en-route to Mozambique during which their vehicle, a Gauteng-registered Toyota Hilux, driven by Richard Mauta Jovo (38), was intercepted by police. As a routine immigration formality, the Mozambicans were asked to produce their passports and they failed to do so, leading to their arrest.

 

The driver who was ferrying them also appeared in court. He was setneced to a fine of R2 000 or 90 days in prison. The court heard that Jovo had assisted the border jumpers from Mozambique to cross into South Africa illegally.

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The good of Immigration in South Africa

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 17:18 PM

His passion however was mathematics, which he started teaching via a makeshift blackboard in the parking lot, until finally a school appointed him to teach formally.

 

We are as a country richer for having him here, and his story illustrates the danger of xenophobia.

 

You see it isn't the criminal that normally gets attacked by xenophobes, the cowards who loot shops are afraid of the serious criminals; it is the people like Fernando, who set up doing what they are passionate about and strive to improve the place they live.

 

The history of empires is a strange one, with the basic strength of many of them being their ability to include people fleeing bad circumstances, and use their skills and knowledge. This is how Rome, which started off as a backwater one got banished to, ended up being the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world in its age.

 

What this sort of immigration means, if it is dealt with in a manner we can cope with, is an influx of unusual and varied skills. There is a continent worth of people who know things we do not, who have experiences we do not share, who can enrich us as a country if we plan for them instead of trying to plan ways to minimise their existence.

 

That is what defined America, before half its major political parties got taken over by knowledge-phobic morons who seem to think corporations are more deserving of personhood than people from other countries.

 

The acceptance of people with different backgrounds can give a country an edge in improving its scientific standing, in boosting our ability to produce. We have skills shortages, and we have refugees with the skills we need to sort that out, we simply need a government with a plan for using them.

 

We can turn our immigration problem into an asset, which we can turn towards a national goal. That is the thing we really lack in this country, a national goal, a definition not of where South Africa is, but where we want it to be.

 

For too long we have heard the rhetoric of more jobs – more jobs doing what exactly? For too long we have spoken about some vague conception of the economy – an economy selling what exactly?

 

We educate our students with no real view as to what we need in terms of labour, producing far more humanities graduates even as our employers scream for scientists and engineers, because we don’t really know what we want to be.

 

With immigrants like Mr Ogadi, we can achieve whatever we set our minds to. We just need to set our minds to something. Personally I think we should go for science, because while we like much of Africa are going to have to start from virtually rock bottom – rock is a pretty good foundation.

 

Let’s stop asking the world to do things for us, let’s start doing things for the world.

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Africa sprints ahead with mobile banking

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 17:17 PM

With all the right ingredients for a successful banking on-the-go eco-system to develop, Africa is the leading the way in mobile banking.

 

Visa's 2011 US$110 million purchase of South African mobile financial services infrastructure provider, Fundamo, certainly let the cat out of the bag. While most of the world might still be feeling their way around mobile banking, many African countries are making giant strides forward in this space and it seems likely that this is where mobile banking models are going to evolve.

 

The numbers speak for themselves. comScore reported in May 2011 that mobile banking use by cellphone users in the five leading markets in Europe (UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy) was 8.5%, with France the highest at 10.3%. Compare that to South Africa, where, according to World Wide Worx data from February 2011, 37% of South African cellphone users also use mobile banking services.

 

Just three ingredients...

 

To generalise about an entire continent, Africa has three ingredients that make this state of affairs stand to reason.

 

Firstly, there is the incredible uptake of mobile phones, across all levels of society. According to the African Development Bank, there were fewer than two million mobile phones users in Africa in 1998. This number grew to more than 400 million by 2009.

 

Secondly, there are a large number of unbanked, or underbanked, people in Africa. A 2009 World Bank report puts this figure at as high as 70% of Africans, while South Africa's First National Bank (FNB) puts this figure at 13 million out of South Africa's population of around 50 million people. Fundamo estimates that 3.5 billion people around the world do not have access to traditional financial services.

 

Third, much of the continent's population lives in rural locations, with very little access to banking infrastructure. Now add into the mix an urban workforce needing to send money to dependents living in rural areas, often very far away. But with all parties owning or having access to a mobile phone, it was inevitable that this was going to be key to extending banking services to the unbanked.

 

Rapid uptake of cellphone banking

 

FNB said in June 2011 that it had seen a rapid uptake of cellphone banking in Africa, with year-on-year growth of 376% in Zambia, 277% in Botswana; 204% in Namibia and 473% in Swaziland. Together, subscribers in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia carry out around 1.2 million cellphone banking transactions per month, worth approximately R122 million. FNB has processed more than R1.2 billion in the last year in these countries. In May 2011, FNB also launched mobile banking services in Lesotho.

 

"The need to transfer money quickly and safely from one person to another is and has always been important in emerging economies," said Danny Zandamela, CEO of FNB Africa in a statement. "Mobile money services offer an inexpensive and convenient method to bridge the gap between the banked and unbanked. The African continent, by pure virtue of being one of the fastest growing mobile phone markets in the world, is the ideal environment for such innovation."

 

FNB has also seen growth in the remittance space since launching eWallet outside of South Africa. Since November 2010 the bank has recorded more than 89 000 transactions totalling R31 million in Botswana.

 

Banking on-the-go

 

But when it comes to ewallet services, Kenya's M-PESA is the undisputed success story. This is where the model gets flipped on its head, with cellphone operators offering banking services to previously unbanked customers in the form of e-wallets and person-to-person money transfers. Where previously people with no access to banks would have had to rely on cash, even for sending money far distances, they can now transfer money more securely via their cellphones.

 

Account holders buy electronic funds at an M-PESA agent and send the electronic value to any other mobile phone user in the country, who can then redeem it for conventional cash at any M-PESA agent. From the initial 'send money home' service, M-PESA has expanded to include airtime top-up, bill payments, salary payments, M-KESHO banking services (which allow customers to earn interest) and more recently international money transfer in partnership with Western Union.

 

According to Safaricom, at the end of April last year, the service had more than 14 million customers and about 28 000 agent outlets countrywide. Over 800 organisations accept payment via M-PESA. Under the auspices of Safaricom's parent company, Vodafone, M-PESA has been exported to Afganistan and Fiji.

 

With the African mobile banking market set to grow to US$22 billion by 2015, and both banks and mobile operators scrambling to own the relationship with the customer, these developments are setting out the playing field for the rest of the world.

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St Kitts citizenship for $250,000 !

by admin,  Mar 12 2013 17:15 PM

For $250,000, a foreigner can buy full rights as a citizen there. The transaction can take as few as three months and applicants need never visit the nation's sandy shores.

 

The allure? St. Kitts citizens can travel without a visa to more than a hundred countries, including Canada and all of Europe. They pay no personal income taxes, and the island's remote location in the West Indies serves as a safe haven, should the need for a quick move ever arise.

 

Demand for a second passport is "way up," says David Lesperance, a Canadian immigration lawyer. Among his recent clients: an Egyptian pro-democracy activist who worries about instability in his country, and a Chicago businessman who is convinced that the Occupy movements will lead to riots.

 

On his website, Lesperance provides a questionnaire to help determine how urgently a second passport is needed. He cites higher taxes, civil lawsuits, and terrorist attacks as top expatriation factors.

 

St. Kitts is one of at least two countries offering so-called citizenship by investment, burgeoning programs that bestow on foreigners the benefits of being a citizen - namely, a passport - for a price.

 

In St. Kitts, a passport goes for a $250,000 cash donation to the country's Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation, which was set up to benefit retired sugar workers. Investors can also buy approved real estate worth at least $400,000. Not included are fees to cover a mandatory background check. For nearby Dominica, the basic cost is $75,000.

 

A third country, Austria, may also offer citizenship for an investment . A provision in the Austrian Citizenship Act states that citizenship can be granted to an applicant if he or she has performed, or would later perform, "extraordinary services" to benefit the Austrian state.

 

Henley & Partners, a firm that specializes in repatriation, maintains that investing large sums of money constitutes an "extraordinary service." And Christian Kalin, a partner at the firm, said during a November conference in London that his clients have successfully obtained Austrian passports in this manner. In Henley's brochure, Henley says Austria extends citizenship for those who invest at least $10 million.

 

Alice Irvin, a spokeswoman at the Austrian embassy in Washington, D.C., strongly rejects suggestions that the country's citizenship is for sale. "We are aware that these claims have been around for a while, but they are baseless," she wrote in an email. Henley's CEO, Eric Major, says otherwise.

 

"The candidate has to have all the right trimmings," says Major. "It's been done, it's possible, but it's fairly rare."

 

Other Western countries also welcome rich foreigners. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand all offer immigrant visas to those who invest enough money in certain types of enterprise. These programs don't instantly result in passports, but the visas are often a fast-track to naturalization, and in some cases, large investments can expedite citizenship.

 

"The idea that someone can gain fast-tracked citizenship in a country they have no ties to based on a wire transfer of funds or cash is a far cry from the vision of equal and participatory membership in a political community that is still reflected in many citizenship and naturalization laws," says Ayelet Shachar, a professor of law, political science and global affairs at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law.

 

"It is likely that we will see more of these economic citizenship programs," Shachar says, "because there are significant pressures on both the demand and the supply side."

 

PRICING A PASSPORT

 

The Henley firm is at the center of the citizenship by investment movement. Registered in Jersey, an island in the English Channel known for its off-shore tax status in the United Kingdom, Henley bills itself as a "citizenship and residence planning" firm that manages and markets parts of the citizenship programs.

 

As well as helping rich people obtain second, and sometimes third, passports, Henley advises governments on how to attract high-net-worth individuals.

 

"Today, a person of talent and means need not limit his or her life and citizenship to only one country," reads Henley's website (link.reuters.com/qep36s). "Making an active decision with regard to your citizenship gives you more personal freedom, privacy and security."

 

To reach would-be clients, Henley organizes events and throws parties through the jet-set social networking site, A Small World (link.reuters.com/pep36s). Kalin is on the "council of experts" of the Sovereign Society, a Florida-based newsletter that circulates a six-step guide on how to live completely tax-free and offers subscribers a discount on Henley's services. Another forum is Henley's annual Global Residence and Citizenship conference, held last November in London.

 

Henley boasts that it can obtain passports for individuals and families in as few as three months. It also publishes a yearly Visa Restriction Index, which ranks a passport's value based on number of countries one can visit without a visa.

 

Last year, St. Kitts was 28th. Dominica was 54th. A U.S. passport and an Irish passport tied for the 5th most valuable. Finland, Sweden and Denmark tied for first place, and Germany and France second and third.

 

But those rankings can change as quickly as world events. Kalin warned as much at the opening of last year's conference, which Reuters attended.

 

"It's obvious to you why a Russian or a Lebanese, a South African or maybe a Chinese would need a second passport and residence," Kalin said. "But why would a person from a stable country want one?

 

"Until a few years ago, you enjoyed very wide and unhindered visa-free travel as a citizen of Denmark. Until September 2005, when a Danish newspaper published some cartoons. By early 2006, Danish embassies in Damascus, Beirut, Tehran were set on fire, and as a citizen of Denmark you found yourself as a target of extremists all over the world. In some countries, you couldn't even enter."

 

Kalin paused.

 

"That is, unless you had a second passport."

 

EXIT STRATEGY

 

Such instability is driving interest from the world's wealthiest, those involved in the programs say.

 

Major, Henley's CEO, says that during the past three years, Henley's citizenship and residence group more than doubled its staff, clientele, and earnings. He won't discuss the particulars but a Henley brochure says nine specialists now handle citizenship matters.

 

"Uncertainty is a big 'push' factor," Major says. "When North Korea shoots missiles, we get a lot of South Koreans. When there's chaos in Cairo, we get lots of Egyptians on the phone."

 

Val Kempadoo, a real estate developer in the Caribbean nation, says as many as 30 firms or individuals, based in Moscow, Dubai, Hong Kong, and other cities, are active in referring clients to St. Kitts for a passport.

 

Adam Bilzerian, a professional poker player and the son of former corporate raider Paul Bilzerian, said he worked through Henley to get citizenship in Austria. But put off by the cost and exclusivity of Austria's program, he purchased property in St. Kitts, filled out some paperwork, and within a year, became a Kittitian. Then, he became one of 231 Americans to renounce his U.S. passport in 2008.

 

In 2011, government records show, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship reached 1,788 - the highest number since the government began keeping track in 1997.

 

Many Americans give up their citizenship to escape US taxes, but Bilzerian says his desire to leave was different. As a child, he saw his father go to prison for a panoply of financial crimes. In 2001, he watched as FBI agents raided his house. Then, while studying at Vanderbilt, he says he grew more politically conscious.

 

"When (George W.) Bush was elected for the second time, I felt that the country was going to be in such a downward spiral," Bilzerian said. "They were eliminating freedoms, restricting the bill of rights. It's so hard to keep yourself out of trouble. If the IRS thinks you're doing something wrong and audit you, they make your life a nightmare ... they run you to the ground."

 

That doesn't mean criminals necessarily find safe haven with a new passport. St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica and Austria all have extradition treaties with the United States. But even though countries carry out background checks, some question the thoroughness of the process.

 

Kim Dotcom, the founder of file-sharing website Megaupload, obtained a New Zealand residence permit by investing 10 million New Zealand dollars - or about 8.35 million U.S. dollars - in New Zealand government bonds through the country's investor visa program in 2010.

 

Dotcom, a German-Finnish dual national formerly known as Kim Schmitz, is in custody in New Zealand after denying charges of internet piracy and money laundering.

 

In Dominica, debate rages over the propriety of citizenship by investment.

 

"I am not a fan of the economic citizenship program," says Crispin Gregoire, Dominica's former ambassador to the United Nations. Gregoire says he wants greater transparency and better screening in the citizenship process.

 

"As it stands, it encourages people with something to hide. I understand that it must be a big source of income for the state, but they're not doing a good job of regulating it."

 

BUCCANEERS

 

Some Kittitians criticize the extent to which citizenship by investment is changing the political - and physical - landscape of their island. Dwyer Astaphan, a former Kittitian minister of national security, justice, and legal affairs, complains that former sugar industry workers, intended to be the beneficiaries of the sugar fund, have no way of knowing where the money goes.

 

"There's no transparency," he says. "Imagine making a contribution to a foundation to get citizenship of a country, but the inside information of the foundation is kept secret!"

 

Astaphan also questions where Henley's responsibility ends and the government's begins.

 

Wendell Lawrence, a partner at Henley, is also St. Kitts' ambassador to CARICOM, the Caribbean Community and Common Market economic organization. SIDF.org, the sugar program's website, is registered under the name of Henley's chairman and to its office address in Jersey.

 

The St. Kitts official in charge of the citizenship by investment unit, Cheryleann Pemberton, says the sugar program is "an independent charitable foundation" registered privately.

 

Kempadoo, who is developing a new resort called Kittitian Hill, worries that public-private partnerships such as Henley's compromise the island's sovereignty.

 

"They're pirates of the Caribbean," he says of companies handling the citizenship business. "The situation of the country predicates that they are open to citizenship by investment. St. Kitts' debt is 180 percent of its GDP. How can the government say no?"

 

GLOBAL BUSINESS

 

Henley has advised Canada and the United Kingdom on how best to attract wealthy individuals through their investor visa programs. "They're an obvious way to raise capital in trying times," says Major, of the expedited visas.

 

Henley is also advising several other countries that want to adopt citizenship by investment, Major says. Among them: Malta and Croatia.

 

All the countries that offer or hope to offer citizenship by investment have very low income tax rates, which make them particularly attractive to Americans, who face lifelong tax reporting requirements regardless of their residence.

 

The only way to escape U.S. taxes is by renouncing U.S. citizenship - and finding a new one.

 

Marshall Langer, an offshore tax and repatriation attorney who spoke at the November conference, talks about the benefits of the program in crasser terms.

 

"It's not enough to just move your assets anymore," Langer says. "Today, you have to move your ass."

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