The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has granted Indian tennis ace Sania Mirza and her husband and Pakistan cricket star Shoaib Malik the much-coveted 10-year UAE Golden Visa. Mirza, 34, who hails from Hyderabad, and Malik, 39, a native of Sialkot in Pakistan, got married in 2010 and has been a resident of Dubai for several years. The much-loved sports couple has a three-year-old son named Izhaan.
The UAE government instituted the Golden Visa in 2019 as a new system for long-term residence visas. It enabled foreigners to live, work, and study in the country without a national sponsor and 100 per cent ownership of their business on the UAE mainland. These visas are for a period of five or 10 years and are renewed automatically.
The UAE Cabinet Resolution No. 56 of Organisation of Residence Permits allows investors (minimum of AED 10 million) entrepreneurs and professional and specialised talents like in the field of science and knowledge to apply for it.
The scope of the Golden Visa was recently widened to include bright students and for 100,000 coders last week under the National Programme for Coders.