MAJURO — In the wake of the late-May sentencing of a California man to nearly three years in jail for tax evasion in connect with the sale of Marshall Islands passports, Marshall Islands authorities report that they have rejected hundreds of requests to renew illegally purchased passports.
Six years after government officials shut down passport sales, the scheme continues to cast a shadow over the country.
According to an official in the Attorney General’s Office, 1,454 Marshall Islands passports were legally sold during a program that was halted in late
1996, after complaints from the U.S. government and auditors about numerous immigration and financial irregularities. The Marshall Islands marketed passports through its overseas embassies and through agents primarily to citizens of Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, selling the documents for about $30,000 each.
Natural born Marshall Islanders have visa-free entry to the United States provided by a Compact of Free Association between the two nations. Despite this privilege not applying to people who purchased passports, many agents representing the Marshall Islands government used the visa-free entry right as a way to generate sales of the passports.
Tommy Ho Ching Cheng, 50, a native of Hong Kong who resides in the California as a permanent resident, begins serving a 33 month sentence in U.S. federal prison on June 14 after pleading guilty to one felony count of tax evasion in connection with the sale of Marshall Islands passports. He admitted that from 1993 through 1996, he earned about $2.5 million and failed to report the income to the Internal Revenue Service.
According to the Justice Department, Cheng told the people he sold passports to that they would be able to freely enter the U.S. and gain employment. He never informed the victims that they would not be able to take advantage of the special privileges granted to Marshall Islands residents because the victims were not citizens of the Marshall Islands nor had they lived in this central Pacific nation for the required five years.
According to the Attorney General’s office in Majuro, only a small percentage of the 1,454 Marshall Islands passports legally sold by the government have actually been renewed, though all expired last year because the program ended in 1996 and they were issued for a five-year duration.
Of the 1,454, only about 300 have been renewed as of Friday, and there are fewer than 100 more currently seeking renewal.
The Attorney General’s Office official said his office only considers renewal of passports that were properly sold by the Marshall Islands government and appear on its master list.
AGO has already rejected more than 300 renewals for passports that it has no record of ever issuing. All of these were sold through agents and there are no records of the sale or information about the whereabouts of the money that was obtained from the sale of these passports, the official said.
Government officials say that one box of blank Marshall Islands passports was stolen from Majuro in the late 1990s and accounts for the illegally issued passports that it is now rejecting for renewal.
