Personnel relocation to Cyprus refers to one of the immigration pathways through which foreigners can migrate to this country for employment purposes.
Foreigners can migrate to Cyprus for employment by applying for 2 types of visa streams: 1) visas available for those who want to find a job opportunity in Cyprus and 2) visas issued for the relocation of employees working in a company that has an office in Cyprus.
The latter is known as intra-company transfer and our immigration lawyer in Cyprus can present the main requirements an applicant must respect.
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What is the intra-company transfer in Cyprus?
Intra-company transfer is an employment immigration system through which an employee of a company that operates in at least 2 countries can be relocated for work activities in the office operating in the other country.
As a general rule, employee relocation to Cyprus is possible only for specific work activities that have a high level of responsibility or where the employee must have a complex set of work skills.
According to the Civil Registry and Migration Department of Cyprus, intra-company transfer is defined by the following elements:
- the employee relocation to Cyprus is done on a temporary basis;
- the employee must arrive from a third party country;
- the company from which the foreigner arrives and the business in Cyprus that will employ the foreigner must be part of the same group of companies;
- the company/group of companies must be established in the European Union (EU);
- the duration of employment must be of minimum 90 days.
Who can apply for personnel relocation to Cyprus?
As said above, only certain categories of employees can apply for the intra-company transfer program, as opposed to foreigners who want to relocate to Cyprus for various types of employment, such as temporary or permanent, skilled or less skilled, etc.
With regards to employee relocation to Cyprus, there are only 3 categories of qualified employees:
- managers;
- persons who work as specialists in a given job activity/field;
- trainee employees.
What are the conditions to apply for intra-company transfer in Cyprus?
Not only that just few categories of employees can qualify for this visa type, but the applicants themselves have to comply with many basic requirements.
Our immigration lawyer in Cyprus can present all the requirements, and in the list below you can discover few of the basics aspects applicants should comply with:
- persons who will apply for employee relocation to Cyprus as managers and specialists must present evidence of being employed in the respective company for 12 uninterrupted months;
- for the trainee employee, a period of only 6 months of employment will suffice;
- when applying for the intra-company transfer visa, the foreigner is required to pay a processing fee of EUR 180;
- one is also entitled to apply for the renewal of the intra-company transfer permit, but for this, a fee of EUR 85 is charged;
- applicants must also have a M70 valid entry permit.
Cyprus has been applying the intra-company transfer system since 2017, when the European law was transposed under the Cypriot law.
The law which regulates at a EU level the intra-company transfer system is the EU Intra-Corporate Transferee (ICT) Directive (2014/66/EU).
In Cyprus, the law was introduced in 2017 by an order of the Ministry of the Interior, which implemented the ICT system as per rules of the Alien and Migration (Amendment) (Ref 2) Law of 2017.
If you want to immigrate to Cyprus under the ICT system, you can find out more information from our immigration lawyer, who can present the list of documents you must prepare for the application.
Please contact our lawyer for more details on the process of personnel relocation to Cyprus.
