When Denis Oleinikov's goods-to-order company was raided in 2011 following production of a batch of T-shirts mocking President Viktor Yanukovych, he decided to leave Ukraine.
Late in 2012 Oleinikov announced in his blog
that he and his family received political asylum in Croatia, and has lived in the
country ever since. Now Oleinikov says he is considering applying for a
Croatian citizenship, which he might receive in six years.
“If you don’t like the state, you should change
it,” Oleinikov said. “Someone tries to change it from inside, others emigrate.”
Just like Oleinikov, many Ukrainian businessmen
apply for residence permits or citizenship abroad in other countries to feel
safer in Ukraine’s turbulent business environment. But usually they don’t have
to sever links with their homeland.
“It doesn’t mean that they want to relocate.
Often they just prepare a kind of a safety cushion,” said Halyna Khomenko, human capital senior manager at
Ernst&Young Ukraine, one of the firms that offer immigration consulting for
well-off Ukrainians.
Appropritatley, Olga Tauzhnianska, senior
consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers Ukraine calls this phenomenon “business
immigration.”
This type of consulting might turn out to be a
gold mine for companies. In its 2013 Wealth Report, Knight Frank, a real estate
consulting firm, predicted that Ukraine will have the highest growth rate of
rich people in Europe. By 2022, this group is set to grow by 74 percent.
Overall, Ukraine provided the biggest number of
migrants of European origin to the European Union in 2011, according to a June
report by the European Commission on Migration and Refugees.
Despite it being illegal for Ukrainians to hold
dual citizenship, many apply for and receive them. Consultants say a second
citizenship allows Ukrainians to bypass a number of bans their own country levy
on them, offering free travel, access to foreign education, cheaper bank loans or
just the ability to transfer money easily abroad.
Igor Kolomoisky, Ukraine’s steel and banking
tycoon who openly admits having dual Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship,
famously said in his 2008 interview to Ukrainska Pravda website that “Ukrainian
legislation and Constitution are ambiguous in this case, and one would be an
idiot not to take advantage of it.”
In 2008, a draft law was registered in
parliament that would make it compulsory for Ukrainians to report receiving a
second citizenship to authorities and make them criminally liable for
concealing this information. But the bill has not moved since then.
“Who would pass this bill, the lawmakers? But
very often these people are those who have dual citizenship,” Ernst&Young’s
Khomenko said.
She also says that interest in foreign
citizenship has been on the rise since 2008, after a wave of news report shed
light on the nation’s rich receiving dual passports en masse.
Lev Myrymsky, a Party of Regions lawmaker,
registered his own draft law in February that would allow dual citizenships.
“I think that a minimum of 10 percent of
citizens of our country now have dual citizenship,” Myrymsky told the Kyiv Post
in a telephone interview. A native of Crimea, where many are believed to carry
Russian passports in addition to Ukrainian, Myrymsky was also rumored to have dual
citizenship. He denied the rumors as “slander.”
A 2010 poll by Razumkov Center think tank
revealed that 49.4 percent of Ukrainians would like to have dual citizenship,
and 13.7 percent they were prepared to give up their current one in return.
But Khomenko says that often businessmen settle
for just a residency permit, which can be easily acquired by buying property or
starting a company in that jurisdiction. The most popular destinations are
Cyprus, Great Britain, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Spain.
“These days, people mostly buy property. When
you show the papers that you have an apartment in the country, the state bodies
have no reasons to turn you down,” said Victoria Vatamanjuk, attorney at law at
Ilyashev & Partners.
Lawyers also say that Ukrainians who live in
border regions and can prove ethnic links with another country can receive dual
citizenship much cheaper. Thus residents of Bukovyna and Transcarpatia in
western Ukraine, often apply for Romanian and Hungarian passports – both
European Union members, while Crimean residents receive Russian citizenship.
The process of getting a Hungarian passport has
become the most visible with a number of firms openly offering assistance for a
fee of €6,000. A new law on dual citizenship in Hungary states that a person
needs only to prove that their ancestors were born in Transcarpatia before 1920
or between 1938-1945, and demonstrate a basic knowledge of the Hungarian
language.
While the state turns a blind eye to the
process, immigrants themselves say the government should change its priorities.
“Rather than banning dual citizenship, Ukraine
should do everything to make sure it’s not in demand, for people to be proud of
their Ukrainian passport just like the U.S. or the German one,” Oleinikov said.
“But we don’t have it here yet.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be
reached at [email protected] and Kyiv Post intern Taras Ivanyshyn can be
reached at [email protected].
