Corsica mulls residency rule

A TOP CORSICAN politician has proposed that property buyers should fulfil residency requirements before they can make a purchase.

The president of the conseil exécutif de Corse Paul Giacobbi told Corse Matin: “If one can buy land in Corsica as easily as a bar of chocolate on a supermarket shelf, then we are courting catastrophe.”

“Therefore we need to limit access to property for non-residents.”

“We could fix a target of five years of residence, or a family limke to Corsica, to not penalise Corsicans elsewhere.”

Giacobbi, a former president of the conseil général de Haute-Corse: “I know that this poses a problem in European law.”

The head of the association Corse-France, Marie-Dominique Roustan-Lanfranchi, strongly opposes the idea: “The price of land is going up everywhere – in the Ile-de France, the Var, the Lot, the situation is sometimes worse and they don’t ask anything of it. We must stop thinking that Corsica is alone in the world.”

She added: “This is an anti-constitutional project, contradicting property rights and breaching the equality of everyone before the law.”

Photo:Flickr/Kjunstorm