The small town of Atherton, in California's San Francisco Bay, was popular with top athletes, Silicon Valley billionaires and prominent politicians. What's more surprising was that, given her salary as an immigration lawyer, Danhong "Jean" Chen was able to afford a dream villa with her husband costing nearly $6 million in 2013. The little local mystery was finally dispelled following a lengthy investigation by the SEC, the US financial markets watchdog, which unraveled the gigantic scam set up by the couple to amass at least $12 million (€11.5 million) by embezzling money from foreign investors seeking residency in the United States, over the course of almost a decade.

The day after her indictment on October 18, 2018, Chen managed to leave the US using an assumed name, Maria Sofia Taylor, with her Dominican passport. The lawyer, however, has no ties with Dominica, a small Caribbean sliver between Guadeloupe and Martinique. To escape American justice, she had secretly purchased this second citizenship a few weeks earlier, as part of a passport of convenience program set up by the island. And she's far from an isolated case.

Thousands of people have acquired Dominican nationality in this way, taking advantage of the "citizenship by investment" (CBI) program. This system, set up by the government in 1993, enables any foreign national to acquire a passport in less than three months, on the sole condition of paying $100,000 or investing twice that amount in the local economy, without even setting foot on the island.

For the first time, a joint investigation by Le Monde, the OCCRP consortium, the American NGO Government Accountability Project and a dozen media partners has shed light on the excesses of this passport of convenience program. For over a year, the journalists scrutinized a list of 7,700 recent possessors of Dominican passports, compiled from public sources and court documents.

La Liga's unusual banking tactics

Among these thousands of new Dominicans – including entire families from China, Russia and the Middle East – are a litany of criminals and embezzlers of all kinds: Taiwanese fraudsters, Azeri oligarchs, a former Afghan minister accused of war crimes and torture, a high-ranking officer from Kaddhafi's Libya, former spies, financial fraudsters, Russian billionaires under sanctions and arms dealers. The list also includes many high-ranking public officials: two central bank governors and a former head of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program rub shoulders with Samir Rifai, the former Jordanian Prime Minister (2009-2011), who declared a few years ago that he did not "approve, from a personal point of view and in general, for a Jordanian to have another nationality."

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