Researcher claims to be ‘misquoted’ in media report on high net worth foreigners becoming citizens

SINGAPORE: A researcher, who reportedly made a prediction on the number of high net worth individuals being granted Singapore citizenship this year, has claimed that he was “misquoted by the media”.

Mr Andrew Amoils, the head of research at wealth intelligence firm New World Wealth, was first cited in an article by Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao on Apr 20.

He reportedly said that up to 3,500 high net worth individuals were expected to become Singapore citizens in 2023, with most of them from China.

Several news outlets, such as The Business Times, Mothership, The Online Citizen and Vulcan Post, later ran articles based on the Zaobao interview.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued a statement on Apr 26 to dismiss the statement as “highly misleading (and) with no credible basis”. The authority added that Singapore citizenship applications for the rest of 2023 “have not even been decided yet”.

Speaking in Parliament on Monday (May 8), Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam said: “After our statement was issued, the researcher wrote to MHA to say that he had been misquoted by the media.

“He said, and I quote, ‘This was simply untrue and not at all what was said in the interview’. He said he had ‘never said anything about citizenship’.”

The researcher also said that he “did not track citizenship in his research”, according to Mr Shanmugam.

“(His) projection referred to high-net-worth individuals moving to Singapore in general. Most of them may be expatriates and work transfers ie. not necessarily persons who applied for and became citizens,” the minister cited the researcher as saying.