The European Commissioner for Justice, Věra Jourová, has announced her intentions to bring forward a report on citizenship-by-investment from December to the autumn, which will seek to issue new, more stringent guidelines, as it is believed that the granting of citizenship poses a serious security risk.

The citizenship-by-investment programmes run by EU sovereign states only process around 700 to 1000 applicants each year. Comparatively, 994,800 people obtained citizenship of an EU-28 member state in 2016, according to Eurostat, meaning citizenship-by-investment applicants account for about 0.1 percent of new EU citizen...