By Princewill Ubani · Published
Research ID: PA-ART-1010979601789616129
Mauritius Proposed Selling Citizenship for $1 Million in 2018. It Never Happened.
Mauritian Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth used his 2018-19 budget speech that June to announce a proposed citizenship-by-investment program. Under the plan, foreigners could obtain Mauritian citizenship for a non-refundable contribution of $1 million to a newly created Mauritius Sovereign Fund, plus an additional $100,000 for each accompanying spouse or dependent. A cheaper parallel track offered a Mauritian passport, without full citizenship, for $500,000 plus $50,000 per dependent. Both schemes were to be run by the country’s Economic Development Board, with the Sovereign Fund’s proceeds earmarked for capital projects and paying down public debt.
The announcement drew immediate criticism at home. Opposition politicians objected to treating nationality as a good for sale, and commentators warned about the reputational risk to a country that had spent roughly two decades working to get itself off international financial grey lists over money-laundering concerns. The price itself raised questions too: at $1 million, the proposed Mauritian citizenship would have cost more than double what most Caribbean citizenship-by-investment programs charged at the time, without a clearly explained justification for the premium.
The scheme needed enabling legislation that never materialized. Mauritius went through a period of political turbulence the following year, and the citizenship plan quietly disappeared from the government’s agenda without ever coming back to Parliament for a vote or a formal withdrawal. No amendments to the Citizenship Act were ever tabled to implement it, and by the early 2020s, immigration researchers tracking the global citizenship-by-investment industry were describing the 2018 Mauritian proposal as a program that had been announced and then simply never built.
Mauritius has continued to attract wealthy foreign residents through other channels since then, offering accelerated naturalization to long-term investors under existing law and, more recently, residence-based programs rather than a direct citizenship sale. But the specific $1 million citizenship product that circulated widely in 2018, and that briefly made headlines as one of the most expensive passports for sale anywhere in the world, never became something a foreigner could actually buy.
Sources
- “Mauritius to Open US$500k Citizenship by Investment Program Says PM in Budget Speech”, Investment Migration Insider.
- “Mauritius Citizenship by Exception: 2026 Guide”, CitizenX.