thought leadership by Yakof Agius Founder and CEO CiviQuo
THE ‘ICY ROADS’ OF RCBI APPLICATIONS: SAFER NAVIGATION THROUGH A COMMON RISK ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK
any stakeholders in the industry believe that having a common risk assessment framework for the residency and citizenship by investment industry (RCBI) would be very beneficial, but also very difficult to achieve, since every country has its own risk appetite. However, in May 2019, the European Union invited industry representatives to give their input to a group of member state experts who had been given this exact same responsibility; to address the concerns identified in the Commission’s report on Investor Citizenship and Residence Schemes, including the development of a common risk management process. To give context to this challenge, it is important to understand how such risks are identified. Countries undertake a periodical process called a national risk assessment whereby the country’s priority concerns relating to money laundering and terrorist financing are identified. This exercise looks at how different risks could impact the country, the probability of those risks materialising and the consequences if they did. An analogy to this would be driving a car in different weather conditions. The risks involved with driving a car are the same everywhere. However, in conditions where roads are prone to icing, there is a higher risk of losing control of a vehicle as opposed to driving on a dry road. So, based on the probability of there being ice on the roads and the possible accidents that may arise due to this, countries put in place accident-
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THE CITIZEN
