Forty-one Cabinet decisions covered 41 principal investors and 109 relatives, while a September 2025 round involving 28 people formed part of that total rather than representing an additional or final purge.
WASHINGTON, DC, September 9, 2026 — President Nikos Christodoulides’s administration significantly expanded Cyprus’s campaign against citizenships granted through the terminated investment program, approving deprivation action affecting 150 investors and relatives by September 2025.
The administration’s 41 decisions concerned 41 principal investors and 109 family members, demonstrating how each reviewed investment file could produce legal consequences for several spouses, children or parents holding derivative citizenship.
The figure should not be described as 41 separate "major deprivation decrees," because official reporting distinguished Cabinet decisions that initiated or approved deprivation from the later issuance of formal orders and completion of administrative procedures.
Nor did Christodoulides single-handedly strip all 150 people of citizenship, since the campaign involved the Council of Ministers, the Interior Ministry, the Legal Service, administrative committees, and courts reviewing challenges from affected recipients.
The September 2025 action involving another 28 people raised the administration’s cumulative total from 122 to 150, meaning those 28 were already included in the reported 41-investor and 109-relative breakdown.
That round was not the final cleanup, because later Interior Ministry data showed additional deprivation approvals and another 26 principal investors still under active investigation for possible citizenship withdrawal.
A New Administration Inherited an Old Crisis
Christodoulides assumed the presidency in February 2023 after serving as foreign minister under Nicos Anastasiades, whose government had overseen both the investment program’s expansion and its eventual termination.
The new administration inherited thousands of legacy citizenship files, extensive recommendations from the Nicolatos inquiry, pending deprivation proceedings and years of sustained criticism from European institutions and domestic anti-corruption advocates.
It also inherited a complicated legal process in which a Cabinet decision did not automatically cancel a physical passport, exhaust an available appeal or complete the formal administrative deprivation of citizenship.
The administration therefore faced two closely related tasks: identifying additional naturalizations considered legally defective and advancing older decisions through notice, administrative review, final orders and cancellation of identity documents.
That distinction is essential when measuring the Christodoulides record accurately, because some final orders issued during his presidency arose from initial Cabinet decisions made between 2021 and early 2023.
Credit for administrative completion consequently belongs partly to the current government, but the underlying investigations, evidentiary work and initial deprivation decisions sometimes originated under the immediately previous presidential administration.
What the 41 Decisions Actually Meant
By September 2025, the Christodoulides Council of Ministers had adopted 41 decisions on principal investor cases, with the affected family groups totaling 150 people.
The total included 41 investors and 109 relatives, meaning family members represented about 72.7% of the administration-specific total, while principal investors accounted for about 27.3%.
The ratio was roughly 2.7 relatives for every principal investor, again showing how the program’s expansive family-naturalization provisions multiplied the overall scale of the later government cleanup.
Each Cabinet decision could encompass a principal investor and several dependents rather than representing a single decree, which helps explain why 41 decisions generated government action affecting 150 separate citizenships.
The decisions also did not establish that all 109 affected relatives had personally submitted false information or participated knowingly in serious misconduct attributed by government authorities to a principal applicant.
Some relatives were affected because their citizenship depended upon the continuing validity of the investor’s naturalization, while others had been approved through family categories that investigators later found legally questionable.
The 41 decisions should therefore be understood as 41 core investor-family files under review rather than 41 fully completed individual deprivation orders or 150 independently proven cases of deliberate fraud.
The September 2025 Round Added 28 People
In September 2025, the Council of Ministers approved six new proposals covering 28 people who had obtained citizenship through the Cyprus Investment Program.
The six new proposals reportedly involved six principal investors and 22 dependent family members, adding to 35 earlier Christodoulides-era Cabinet decisions that had already affected 122 people.
Once those new files were included, the administration’s cumulative enforcement count became 41 decisions affecting 150 people, divided precisely between 41 principal investors and their 109 dependent relatives.
The 28-person round was therefore added to the earlier 122-person administration subtotal, but it was not another separate group outside the officially reported 150-person cumulative Christodoulides-era figure.
This distinction prevents serious double counting, because adding 28 to 150 would incorrectly produce 178 Christodoulides-era cases when the government’s own publicly reported cumulative arithmetic remained exactly 150.
The round also should not be described as "final," since the Interior Ministry subsequently reported several unresolved investigations and the overall approved-deprivation count continued rising substantially after September 2025.
The Public Record Did Not Prove Identical Fraud in All 28 Cases
Accounts of the September decisions commonly linked the broader cleanup to fraud, criminal histories, sanctions, and failures to comply with investment conditions.
The government did not publicly release individualized evidence showing that every one of the 28 people committed foundational identity fraud, concealed a global criminal record, or used false financial statements.
Those descriptions may accurately characterize particular cases within the wider enforcement campaign, but applying every serious allegation to all 28 recipients collectively would exceed the publicly available supporting evidence.
Possible deprivation grounds across the program included false or misleading declarations, undisclosed international criminal matters, failure to maintain qualifying investments, sanctions exposure and naturalizations granted without adequate domestic legal authority.
Some adverse information may also have emerged only after citizenship was granted, requiring officials to distinguish a concealed material fact existing during the application from a genuinely later legal development.
That evidentiary timing matters considerably because a later arrest, prosecution or sanctions designation does not automatically prove that the applicant deliberately lied during the original Cypriot government due-diligence process.
The government may still have other statutory grounds for deprivation, but responsible reporting should separate those grounds from an unsupported assertion that every affected person intentionally defeated a background check.
Cabinet Decisions, Deprivation Orders and Completed Cases
The Christodoulides-era statistics separated at least three stages that are frequently collapsed into the single phrase "passport revocation."
First, the Council of Ministers could decide to initiate or approve deprivation proceedings against an investor and affected members of the investor’s family.
Second, the government could issue a formal Deprivation of Citizenship Order only after completing the required notice, administrative review, and decision-making procedures legally applicable to the individually affected person.
Third, the administration could complete the process by updating national citizenship records, canceling government identity documents, and formally invalidating the person’s passport for both domestic and international use.
By September 2025, the current administration had also issued formal deprivation orders for 69 people whose initial Cabinet decisions were made during the preceding 2021-to-2023 government review period.
That category remained separate from the 150 people covered by the administration’s own 41 decisions, because it measured formal administrative action advancing cases inherited from earlier Cabinet reviews.
Reporting at the time said the full forfeiture process had been completed for only 15 people during the administration’s tenure, comprising five principal investors and ten dependent relatives.
The figures clearly illustrate why an announcement that 150 people were "stripped" of citizenship can communicate the intended political outcome while obscuring how many files had reached final administrative completion.
The Scheme-Wide Total Was Larger Than the Administration’s Figure
The 150-person count measured decisions attributed specifically to the Christodoulides government, whereas Cyprus’s scheme-wide total combined action taken under successive administrations since the cleanup began.
As of September 2025, Cypriot authorities said deprivation had been formally decided for 360 people, including 101 principal investors and 259 dependent family members across the entire cross-administration government campaign.
Only 112 of those procedures had been administratively completed at that stage, meaning official documents had been canceled for a substantially smaller group than the announced headline deprivation total.
Later, Interior Ministry figures reported publicly in November 2025 that the scheme-wide number of approved deprivation procedures had risen to 373 people, comprising 103 principal investors and 270 directly dependent relatives.
The latest detailed Interior Ministry accounting reported by Phileleftheros said 116 procedures had been completed, involving 35 investors and 81 family members, while another 26 investors remained under investigation.
Those later figures confirm that the September round was neither final nor the campaign’s endpoint, because approved actions and completed cases continued moving after the administration reached its 150-person milestone.
Why the Overall Total Increased From 360 to 373
The movement from 360 approved deprivations in September 2025 to 373 in the later ministry accounting represented an increase of 13 people across additional investor and family cases.
The reported principal-investor count rose from 101 to 103, while the dependent family-member count increased from 259 to 270, together producing the combined 13-person change in formally approved procedures.
Over the same reporting period, completed procedures increased from 112 to 116, showing that new decisions entered the enforcement pipeline faster than older cases reached final administrative closure.
That pattern helps explain the persistent administrative bottleneck in the cleanup: the government could approve additional deprivation actions while lawyers, administrators, and courts continued processing earlier notices, objections, and appeals.
The later data did not provide a public case-by-case explanation for all 13 additions, preventing reliable attribution of each person to fraud, sanctions, criminal history, or another legal ground.
The Latest Ministry Data Also Revised the Program’s Historical Scale
The Interior Ministry’s November 2025 response said 7,329 people had obtained citizenship through the investment program, consisting of 3,522 principal investors and 3,807 family members.
That total exceeded the 6,779 citizenships examined or counted within the scope commonly associated with the Nicolatos inquiry, apparently reflecting differences in datasets, covered periods, recipient categories, or administrative records.
The two figures should not be merged casually, because the inquiry’s legal findings and the ministry’s later program-wide administrative count answered materially different statistical and regulatory questions.
Using the ministry’s broader 7,329-person total, the 373 approved deprivation procedures represented approximately 5.1% of everyone officially recorded as having acquired citizenship through the investment program.
The 116 completed procedures represented approximately 1.6% of all recorded recipients, illustrating the considerable administrative distance between official findings of widespread unlawful approvals and fully executed legal deprivation.
Those percentages do not diminish the seriousness of the inquiry’s conclusions. Still, they reveal how slowly governments can reverse citizenship decisions after legal status and family rights have already been established.
Why "Single-Handedly" Misstates the Process
Christodoulides provided political direction through his presidency and chaired an administration that sped up Cabinet action, but the enforcement campaign depended on several institutions.
The Interior Ministry reviewed files and prepared proposals, the Council of Ministers adopted decisions, the Legal Service advised upon statutory procedure, and courts considered challenges brought by affected citizens.
Investigators, domestic police agencies, international sanctions authorities and foreign governments also supplied adverse information that could trigger a new and more detailed examination of an investor’s citizenship file.
The Nicolatos inquiry and earlier government decisions provided much of the evidentiary, legal and institutional foundation that allowed the current administration to continue expanding the citizenship deprivation campaign significantly.
Describing the president as having single-handedly removed 150 people therefore seriously exaggerates executive control and understates the due-process obligations that prevent nationality from being canceled through presidential declaration alone.
Why "Purge" Is Political Shorthand
The term "purge" captures the scale and political urgency of Cyprus’s retrospective review, but it is not the legal name of the administrative procedure used to withdraw citizenship.
Each affected person remained the subject of an individual legal status, requiring officials to identify a statutory basis and provide the procedural protections applicable under Cypriot and European law.
That individualized legal structure prevented the government from lawfully canceling every investor’s citizenship through a single collective proclamation, even after the Nicolatos inquiry identified widespread illegality throughout the program.
It also meant that cases based upon alleged material misrepresentation could proceed differently from cases involving sanctions, subsequent criminal developments, failure to maintain investments, or unauthorized family-naturalization categories.
The campaign nevertheless appeared purge-like in political terms because the government repeatedly announced new groups, revisited approvals spanning several presidencies, and publicly framed deprivation as national reputational repair.
For recipients, however, the decisive questions remained specific: what information had been provided, which legal condition had allegedly failed, and whether the government followed the required procedure before withdrawing nationality.
Using "purge" in a headline can therefore communicate the campaign’s breadth, provided the article explains that the underlying process consisted of separate Cabinet files, formal orders and appealable administrative decisions.
That important distinction protects both factual accuracy and due process, while still recognizing that the Christodoulides administration made citizenship deprivation a prominent and continuing component of its broader anti-corruption agenda.
European Pressure Continued to Shape the Cleanup
The Christodoulides administration presented the revocation campaign as part of a broader strategy to increase transparency, combat corruption and restore Cyprus’s international reputation.
Government officials also pursued amendments to population-register legislation intended to reflect European Commission recommendations and prevent any future revival of administrative practices associated with the terminated investment citizenship program.
The European Union continued monitoring Cyprus’s institutional response. At the same time, its 2025 Rule of Law country chapter recorded continuing concern about the negative publicity and corruption issues associated with the former citizenship-by-investment program.
That sustained external scrutiny mattered because every Cypriot naturalization conferred valuable European citizenship rights affecting free movement, residence, and economic participation across the wider European Union.
The cleanup was therefore both a complex domestic administrative project and a sustained attempt to reassure other European governments that Cyprus could reliably identify, review and correct defective naturalizations.
Compliance Determined Whether Citizenship Could Endure
The continuing deprivation campaign showed that possession of a genuine government-issued passport does not make the underlying citizenship immune from later review.
Naturalization can remain legally vulnerable when material information is concealed, supporting documents are false, qualifying investments are not maintained, or the government lacks sufficient statutory authority to approve it.
Amicus International Consulting’s discussion of second passports and lawful legal identity planning similarly emphasizes that international mobility arrangements must comply with applicable laws because noncompliance can produce revocation and other serious consequences.
That principle does not justify automatic deprivation whenever public controversy develops, because affected citizens remain entitled to adequate notice, individualized assessment and whatever appeal rights national and European law provide.
It instead reinforces the continuing importance of accurate factual disclosure, independently verified source-of-funds evidence, and a lawful naturalization pathway supported in practice by clear, durable, and judicially defensible statutory authority.
Amicus International’s analysis of compliance-based citizenship planning likewise argues that durable status depends upon legal legitimacy rather than the speed, price, or promotional appeal of an investment route.
The Meaning of the Christodoulides Milestone
The Christodoulides administration’s verified September 2025 milestone included 41 Cabinet decisions affecting 150 people, including 41 principal investors and 109 relatives.
The 28-person September round was already included within that 150-person total, raising the earlier administration subtotal of 122 rather than creating a separate and inaccurate cumulative total of 178.
Those decisions did not prove that all 150 recipients committed fraud, nor did they establish that every passport had been recovered, every appeal exhausted, or every file administratively closed.
Later ministry data placed the complete cross-administration campaign at 373 approved deprivation procedures, with 116 procedures fully completed and another 26 principal investors still under active investigation for possible action.
The most accurate conclusion is that Christodoulides accelerated Cyprus’s golden-passport review and expanded the enforcement pipeline. At the same time, inherited cases, legal challenges, and incomplete procedures prevented the campaign from becoming an instantaneous presidential purge.
