Malta has fifth-highest number of firms offering services related to residency and citizenship by investment

Foreigners seeking to acquire residency or citizenship in Malta don’t have to look too long, with the country having 85 firms offering residency and citizenship by investment (RCBI) services.

This is the fifth-highest concentration of companies offering such services in the world, tied with Limassol and just after Nicosia, which has 87. Both cities are in Cyprus.

The city with the largest number of firms offering RCBI services is Dubai, by a large margin. The emirate has 177 firms engaging in the industry.

It is followed by the Pearl River Delta, with 95 firms offering RCBI services. The Pearl River Delta is a Chinese megalopolis that includes Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Macau, and other cities to make up the largest urban area on Earth.

London, with 90, comes in third.

The information emerges from the IMI Rolodex, described as the world’s largest investment migration company database. It includes information on over 1,200 firms in the investment migration market.

Christian Henrik Nesheim, editor of IMI (Investment Migration Insider) Daily, said that the tool covers more than 3,000 offices in nearly 500 cities.

Writing on LinkedIn, he pointed out that the industry “is heavily concentrated in just a handful of cities”.

He added that despite the large number of firms offering RCBI services, only 341 companies worldwide “are pure-play investment migration advisors” – as opposed to, for example, Big 4 firms with an RCBI desk.

When only considering these dedicated investment migration firms, Dubai is once again far ahead of all competition with 102 of the 177 firms offering RCBI services in the city being specialists.

The Pearl River Delta and London reprise their positions in second and third place.

However, Malta comes far further down in this ranking, coming in 17th place with only 14 of the RCBI services providers present in the country being dedicated solely to this role.

The figures indicate that although Malta does indeed have a large residency and citizenship by investment industry, this largely operates through firms engaged in a broader range of professional and corporate services.