The Shopkeeper Who Broke Argentina's Golden Passport
A Chinese shopkeeper, a dead decree, and Milei's Golden Passport problem
Welcome Avatar! Some days the timing writes itself. Last week, the Financial Times ran a piece on Argentina preparing to sell its passport to the world's HNWI, complete with a cameo from a certain Palantir founder who moved his family to Buenos Aires back in April.
A few hours later, in a courtroom most of those FT readers will never hear about, three electoral judges took a red pen to the legal scaffolding the whole thing was built on. This happened after my Friday piece, which discussed one ruling that had already set the tone for the judicial mood around citizenship laws in Argentina.
One of them was a polished pitch aimed at family offices and private-bank clients. The other was a court ruling about a Chinese supermarket owner in a town of a few thousand people in Entre Ríos. Today that ruling was made public.
Guess which one decides whether you can buy an Argentine passport next year. The collision between those two stories is the most interesting thing to happen in the mobility world all year, and almost nobody has connected them yet. Here we go.