Athens (AFP)

Three years ago, Jiang Rungong invested in real estate in Athens, obtaining in exchange a residence permit in Greece, under the so-called "gold visa" program, which has attracted 3,400 Chinese buyers since its launch in 2013.

"Since we got the visa, we took the opportunity to travel in several European countries but when we return to Greece, we feel at home," said the fifties from Shanghai.

Thanks to the purchase of an apartment in Athens, he receives a residence visa for him, his wife and son, Jiang Semniao, 18, who already speaks Greek.

"We chose Greece for its cultural heritage, its history, democracy, freedom, we really like the atmosphere," he says.

Inaugurated in 2013, at the peak of the Greek crisis, while real estate prices have dropped drastically, the program of the "golden visa" grants a five-year renewable residence permit to nationals of non-European countries having invested at least 250,000 euros in real estate.

Other crisis-stricken southern European countries, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal, have used the same program to attract investment.

Last year in Greece, the number of such visas for non-European nationals increased by 46%.

About 5,300 residence permits have been granted since 2013, according to official figures, including 3,400 to Chinese investors, followed by Russians and Turks.

- Close ties with China -

For more than a decade, Greece has developed close trade relations with China, which sought to find a basis for its expansion into Europe.

In 2008, two terminals of the port of Piraeus were sold to the Chinese shipping giant Cosco, which acquired the third terminal in 2016 and aspires to make the port of Athens a bridge between Asia and the Old Continent.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis returns from a visit to the Shanghai Import Fair. And Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives Sunday in Athens for a three-day visit.

"There has never been a better time to write a new chapter in Greece's relations with China," Mitsotakis said in Shanghai.

According to experts, the Chinese no longer look only at Greece as a gateway to the Schengen area, but they appreciate the quality of life on the Hellenic lands.

"The Chinese gather in Athens and its suburbs, constituting small + China towns +, they buy sets of buildings whose owners are all Chinese," says Annie Avgouli, manager of the migration department of the law firm Dedes, which has its own service dedicated to Chinese enjoying gold visas.

But "when you tell the client that it takes at least a year to prepare the case, it's like showing them the way out," says Dorina Cobzaru, Dedes' investment manager.

The procedures are slow because gold visas are processed by the same administration, which processes tens of thousands of asylum applications.

- Capital control -

To facilitate investments, a new law was passed at the end of October. Special provisions make it possible to circumvent the strict capital controls in China by transferring the required 250,000 euros into several bank transactions.

Greek Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis, who recently visited China, told AFP that the Bank of Greece had concluded that this process via the use of bank card terminals "did not violate Greek law, neither the European law ".

The European Commission has, however, called on member countries to reduce the practice of gold visas.

In a report published in early 2019, it pinned Bulgaria, Cyprus and Malta where wealthy investors often escape adequate security controls.

But Greece, which seeks to attract investors to recover from a decade of crisis, does not want to miss the opportunity.

The Bank of Greece estimates that the gold visa program has already attracted 469 million euros of Chinese capital in 2018, and 443 million for the first six months of 2019, against 77 million in 2017.

© 2019 AFP