Passport sales programs have an uneven history in the Pacific Islands. Although Tonga was among the first of the countries to sell its passports to thousands of purchasers (starting in the early 1980s), its program has been mostly haphazard, largely illegitimate and often deemed to be illegal. Later schemes appeared in the 1990s in other offshore tax havens - the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, and Nauru - but each has suffered similar problems.
↧