Education fund for Golden Visa launched

A special open private education fund which offers a Golden Visa in exchange for a minimum €350,000 investment has been launched in a partnership between venture capital and equity management company Magnify Partners and a Portuguese private family office.

The Sharing I Fund is a venture capital fund in which applicants — both Golden Visa applicants and general investors — can invest in two new International Baccalaureate (IB) certified schools and a students’ residence and campus built in Oeiras, near Lisbon in the project ‘Sharing Education 4 Life’.
There has been a boom in demand for private International education over the past decade with three major new schools opening over the past three years in Greater Lisbon – the International Sharing School, the United International School of Lisbon and future Eduction Hub and the British School.
The current investment opportunity involves the International Sharing School which belongs to an NGO non-profit foundation. The school currently has around 350 pupils from 50 different nationalities with classes of up to 20 working in English, but also a curriculum that includes Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Russian and German among other languages.
The school now is in the process of expanding to meet the growing demand for relocators from China, the US, Brazil, Asia and the Middle East who have moved or are moving to Portugal because of its enviable lifestyle, advantageous tax concessions, excellent private and public health coverage and untenable safety record.
The Sharing Foundation has joined forces with a fund management team with international experience in managing private equity funds totalling €1.3Bn. The International Sharing Foundation’s educational management team is led by the Madeiran Santos family with more than 40 years of experience in the international private education sector in Portugal
The Sharing I Fund targets returns of IRR > 7%, benefiting from 0% capital gains on tax on fund returns.
For Golden Visa investors, these will have the possibility of exercising a put option on year six (the minimum time period the investment in exchange for a right to Portuguese residency and free circulation within Schengen area is five years) with the investor’s right to receive its share of the gross income up to a maximum amount of 4%. In year 10 investors have the right to receive annually, the share of the gross income up to a maximum amount of 5%. At any time, and on their own initiative, the Golden Visa investors can sell their participation to third parties.
The Sharing I Fund is an onshore European equity fund for the Golden Visa Portugal and is USA-FATCA compliant.
The investment opportunity was unveiled on Tuesday in a webinar organised by the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in Brazil (São Paulo) entailed ‘Investment in Education Fund for Golden Visa’.
João Barata, partner at Magnify Partners Financial Advisory with responsibilities in areas of Real Estate and Wealth Management Investments, says that many overseas investors looking for a Golden Visa apply for it so they can enjoy visa-free travel in the Schengen area but do not want to actually move to or live in Portugal. This is the case with many Brazilian investors, but others too.

The education project

The investment which starts at €350,000 for Golden Visa applicants and €100,000 for general investors is for The Project – ISS Oeiras (Plot V1 – SC) and School E2 (Plots 21-26).
The former involves the acquisition (surface right for 38 years with automatic 50 years renewal) for Plot V1 in 2021. The development (project, licensing and constriction) will take place in 2022 and be opened in 2023.
The plot will be used to develop a wide range of sports and leisure areas and facilities including football fields, swimming pools, learning trails, an urban park, climbing wall, sensory garden, amphi theatre, pedagogical farm, tennis courts, parking, public areas and sharing club.
The latter, School E2 (Plots 21-26) involves the expansion of the existing school which has 350 pupils to a large state-of-the-art multicultural multilingual international school with a capacity to take at least 1000 pupils from all over the world.  The concept is by international architects Openbook which has a wide experience in large corporate and educational campuses and hospitals in Portugal and around the world and, for example, designed the Nestlé campus not far from the International Sharing School. The interior design concept will be by world-famous educational space design specialists Rosan Bosch.
Under Portugal’s Golden Visa scheme non-EU investors can opt for the capital transfer of the amount of €350,000 for the acquisition of units of investment funds or venture capital funds or funds dedicated to the capitalisation of companies, capital injected under the Portuguese legislation, whose maturity, at the moment of the investment, is, at least, of five years and, at least, 60% of the investments is realised in commercial companies with head office on national territory. The capital transfer will be facilitated by law firm TFRA and private bank Bison Bank