Post
by flyez » Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:56 am
Here I come---
They said it allow 6-month absencs in maximum over your 4-year period.
6-month= 24 weeks, so 24/4 yrs= 6 weeks per year.
The details article is shown as below
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The market in citizenship
Source: The Economist, July 1, 2005
Bureaucrats are tightening rules on passports for the wealthy and talented
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The problem comes with anyone wanting to convert his visa into "indefinite leave to remain" (Britain's equivalent of America's Green Card). This normally requires four years' continuous residence in Britain. After a further year, it normally leads to British citizenship.
The law defines continuous residence sensibly. Business trips and holidays don't count, if the applicant's main home is in Britain. As a rule of thumb, an average of 90 days abroad was allowed each year. But unpublished guidelines seen by The Economist are tougher: they say that "none of the absences abroad should be of more than three months, and they must not amount to more than six months in all". Over the four years needed to qualify, that averages only six weeks a year.
For many jet-setters, this restriction is a career-buster. Six weeks abroad barely covers holidays, let alone business travel. Alexei Sidnev, a Russian consultant, has to turn down important jobs because he cannot afford any more days abroad. If applicants they travel "too much", their children risk losing the right to remain in Britain.
Roger Gherson, who runs a specialist immigration law firm, reckons that, including such dependents, the new rule could affect 750,000 people. "Panic will reign in Canary Wharf [in London's financial district] when they start implementing this," he says. Next week his firm is going to court to try to have the guidelines ruled illegal. They came to light in a case involving a wealthy foreigner who runs an international property business. His application for permanent residency was rejected in April, though in the previous four years he had been abroad for only 351 days, and never for more than 90 days at a stretch.
The Home Office insists that the rules have not changed since 2001. That would confirm Mr Gherson's suspicion that the new policy has come in by accident, probably as a result of zeal or carelessness by mid-ranking officials. Their attitude is at odds with the stance of the government, which has been trying for years to make the system more user-friendly for the world's elite. It even moved processing of business residency cases from a huge office in Croydon, notorious for its slowness and hostility to would-be immigrants, to a new outfit in Sheffield.
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