Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Hong Kong nationals are the leading investors in the UK tier1 investor visa scheme, according to new visa data released by Home office.
This scheme known as the UK’s golden ticket visa scheme welcomes rich and wealthy requires £2m invested in the UK in exchange for a three year visa.
The Tier1 high value investor scheme remains the fastest golden visa scheme in the world with processing time less than 2 weeks for an entry clearance visa.
According to the latest Home office statistics. for the first quarter of 2020, the home office received 48 applications from main investors excluding family members.
The Covid-19 coinciding with Brexit, also had an impact on the big drop in number of applications received overall for 2020 first quarter. Compared to the same quarter last year (2019), the number of applications dropped by 69% for the first quarter of 2020
| Q1 | Filed Applications (Main investors) | Approved Applications. (Main investors) |
| 2017 | 78 | 75 |
| 2018 | 108 | 96 |
| 2019 | 154 | 131 |
| 2020 | 48 | 45 |
Source: Home Office
Hong Kong is home to many millionaires in Asia. Some 500,000 millionaires live in Hong Kong as of 2019 Credit suisse report.
The imposition of china security law has setoff a crisis, which led to massive protests in Hong Kong midst a coronavirus pandemic, has made many wealthy individuals to rethink their strategy about immigrating to other developed nations in the world. Interest to settle in the UK is already very high from Hong Kong.
The visa statistics shows Hong Kong nationals received 15 entry clearance for high value investor category which is more than the double received by chinese.
| Q12020 | Investor visas Issued (main applicants) |
| Hong Kong | 15 |
| China | 7 |
| India | 5 |
| United States | 4 |
| Turkey | 2 |
Earlier this month, UK government announced a new BN(O) special visa route which will open in Jan 2021 to BN(O) citizens and their family members. This is a five year visa does not require any investment, comes with full right to work, settle in the UK
