The Department of Immigration and Border Protection announced yesterday that they will be suspending all new nominations for the Significant Investor Visas programme from 24 April 2014 until the start of the new financial year: 1 July 2015.

This does not prevent applicants from lodging an Expression of Interest (EoI) in this time, however, if nominated, they will be subject to the new complying framework that will be introduced on 1 July 2015. Any EoI lodged that are still yet to be nominated are most likely going to be withheld until 1 July 2015. This essentially means that the suspension is active now.

Existing holders of these visas are not going to be affected by the change in the complying investment scheme. A draft (note: not yet finalised) of the complying investment(s) has been posted on the Austrade website.

Is anyone truly surprised? Probably not. Changes have been in the works for some time now, with the realisation that maybe the current programme was not achieving the desired results the DIBP and stakeholders anticipated.

Noticeably, managed funds set up to investing in Australian residential property seems to be off the table, potentially closing a loophole some have been using to buy Australian property.

It will be very interesting to view how the complying investment framework will look, which you can only expect will be announced just before or at the start of the re-opening of the programme and the introduction of the Premium Investor Visa.