Türkiye cancels or withdraws thousands of investment-based citizenship decisions: a due-diligence reading

What the ministry said

Unofficial translation. The ministry’s statement is in Turkish, and the Turkish text is the only authoritative version. The summary in this section is our own unofficial English rendering.

In a press statement dated 21 September 2026, Türkiye’s Ministry of Interior described how applications for citizenship by investment are checked: investment eligibility certificates are issued first, security and archive checks follow, and the population and citizenship directorate concludes the file.

The ministry said reviews of fake and irregular appraisal reports led to the cancellation of investment eligibility certificates for 1,150 investors, and to the cancellation of citizenship decisions for 5,391 people including family members. Separately, citizenship decisions for 743 people, including 263 investors and their families, were withdrawn on public-order and national-security grounds. In total, it said, decisions covering 1,413 investors and 6,134 people had been cancelled or withdrawn.

The same statement said a separate investigation by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office had identified 1,070 people, including family members, who obtained Turkish citizenship irregularly through sham property sales, and that irregularities constituting offences are being referred to the judicial authorities.

A due-diligence reading

The detail that matters for families is not the numbers but the mechanism. The cancellations followed findings about the investment and the documents behind it: fake or irregular appraisal reports and, in the Istanbul investigation, sham property sales. The ministry’s figures include investors’ family members.

Due diligence is not only a gate at the start of an application. Most of these decisions were revisited after the authorities found problems with the documents behind the investments; others were withdrawn on security grounds. This is why clear, verifiable documentation matters. We encourage families to keep a clear, verifiable record of where their money came from and how it moved. Our guide on source of funds and source of wealth explains what that record usually contains.