Ten months of silence on the firm behind the Pearl Residence

None of this has been examined at length by any Maldivian news outlet. The brief, mostly factual write-ups that followed July’s announcement carried Henley’s framing of itself, and stopped there. 

On November 5, at an industry conference in London, Economic Minister Mohamed Saeed announced the launch of the Maldives Pearl Residence, with Henley as its architect. The investment migration advisory firm is chaired by Swiss businessman Christian Kälin, whom OCCRP has called "the Passport King."

Kälin is also founder and chairman of the Andan Foundation, where former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed serves as an advisor. The Foundation and Henley awarded Nasheed the Global Citizen Award in 2024, which comes with a US$ 20,000 monetary prize for the awardee's humanitarian work.

The programme was promoted in President Dr Mohamed Muizzu's parliamentary address in February 2026. It was scheduled to launch in April. That deadline has now passed. As of publication, the programme has not yet officially opened. Henley's official website states that the programme is set to launch in "H1 of 2026". With H1 ending on June 30, the full launch can be expected within the next few weeks.

The joint announcement in July 2025 framed the Pearl Residence as a residence-by-investment programme structured around real estate acquisition, targeting ultra-high-net-worth individuals. Philippe Amarante, Henley's Managing Partner, told guests at the signing ceremony in Singapore that the programme would offer "state-of-the-art properties with the utmost privacy and exclusivity" to investors seeking "the ultimate hedge against geopolitical conflict or global pandemics." The remarks passed with no reaction from local media.

The legal groundwork for foreign residency by investment was laid in November 2020, when former President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih ratified the second amendment to the Immigration Act. Before the amendment, only foreign nationals investing at least US$ 50 million could obtain a resident visa. The 2020 change reduced the minimum requirement to US$ 250,000 and created a corporate resident visa for foreigners willing to keep US$ 250,000 in a fixed deposit at a Maldivian bank for five years.

In an op-ed published in IMGlobal Wealth on 26 December 2025, Minister Saeed wrote that the programme could generate "more than USD 1 billion in direct and indirect inflows" to the Maldivian economy. In President Muizzu’s 2040 Vision booklet, the government projected US$ 1.5 billion in investment inflows from the programme over five years.

The Pearl Residence is a golden visa programme, not a citizenship programme. The Maldivian constitution restricts citizenship to Muslims, and there is no provision for citizenship by investment. A resident visa is a powerful document, but it is not a passport.

In his own words, Minister Saeed has described Henley's role in the Pearl Residence as "programme structuring, investor engagement and international marketing". That is an unusually frank summary of how Henley operates.

The firm's business model, refined since its first major government contract with St. Kitts and Nevis in 2006, follows a consistent template. Henley approaches a small country with limited fiscal options. It proposes an investor migration programme. It then drafts the legal framework, markets the programme to wealthy foreigners worldwide, runs initial due diligence on applicants, and in some programmes channels the qualifying investments through projects on which its affiliated real estate arm, Henley Estates, takes commissions. The host government receives applicant fees and donations or investments. Henley earns at multiple points in the same transaction. Whether the Maldivian Pearl Residence will follow this exact model is unclear.

In Malta, Henley designed the Individual Investor Programme that journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was investigating at the time she was murdered in October 2017. According to the OCCRP, Henley was contractually designated the programme's "unique concessionaire", giving it the right to distribute fees to dozens of law firms processing applications and to operate its own real estate company taking commissions on the qualifying property investments. Henley earned € 28.8 million in programme fees by mid-2018. In 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled the Maltese citizenship programme unlawful, ending it after more than a decade. 

In Cyprus, OCCRP reported in 2021 that Henley had processed a citizenship application for Jho Low, the fugitive financier at the centre of the 1MDB scandal in which an estimated US$ 4.5 billion was looted from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. Henley's internal files classified Low as a high risk politically exposed person. The application proceeded. Henley earned € 60,000 on the citizenship and a further € 650,000 on arranging Low's villa purchase. In November 2019, the company denied media reports that they assisted the Malaysian fugitive. The Cypriot programme was suspended in 2020 after Al Jazeera's "Cyprus Papers" investigation exposed broader abuses.

In the Caribbean, where Henley built the original model, an OCCRP investigation in March 2022 used leaked internal documents to identify a roster of applicants who had been approved through Henley. They included the wife of sanctioned Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimov, who bought a US$ 6 million property at the Christophe Harbour development to qualify for St Kitts citizenship, generating Henley a US$ 480,000 commission. They included family members of Ruben Vardanyan – co-founder of the Russian bank whose employees ran the US$ 4.6 billion Troika Laundromat money laundering operation – though Vardanyan himself, ranked at the highest risk level by Henley's own systems, did not finalise his own application according to his lawyers. They included a sitting president of Armenia, Armen Sarkissian, who held a St Kitts passport in violation of his country's constitutional prohibition on dual citizenship for heads of state. The firm said it had no recorded interaction with Sarkissian and that it had always “adhered to all laws and regulations applicable in all the jurisdictions they have ever operated in and currently operate.”

In several reported cases, Henley's own internal risk systems flagged the applicants accurately. The applications proceeded. Most were approved. In response to OCCRP, Henley has consistently said that final approval rests with sovereign governments and that the firm follows the screening processes those governments specify. That defence holds at the level of any single transaction. The aggregate picture is harder to defend. One must wonder how a company with this record entered into a major partnership with the Maldivian government with no pushback from Maldivian institutions or media.

In Malta, in Cyprus, in St Kitts, the same architecture has produced the same outcomes. A small country needs revenue. Henley provides a ready-made programme. The programme operates for several years generating fees on both sides. A scandal breaks, a journalist is assassinated, an EU body intervenes. The programme is suspended, restructured, or shut down. The host country has to deal with the reputational damage while Henley moves on to the next contract.

The reason the pattern is consistent is that it is structural. Henley earns money when applicants are approved. Henley does not earn money when applicants are rejected. Whatever the firm's stated values, the gradient of incentives runs in one direction. In multiple reported cases, the firm flagged applicants as the highest risk tier and then submitted the application anyway, sometimes appealing initial government rejections successfully.

For the Maldives, the country's recent history with discretionary tourism leasing is troubled. The MMPRC scandal during former President Abdulla Yameen's administration saw an estimated US$ 90 million in tourism lease revenues diverted to politicians and associates.

The institutional apparatus that approved those leases is, in broad terms, the same apparatus that will approve Pearl Residence developments.

Jubraan Shareef is an anonymous Maldivian X account that publishes leaked documents and RTI disclosures on government and political affairs.