Christian Kälin

According to Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Kälin possesses at least five passports personally. When asked by The Economist in 2017, Kälin declined to reveal how many passports he has.

In collaboration with Dimitry Kochenov, Kälin authors The Quality of Nationality Index (QNI), an annual report published since 2015. The index ranks the quality of nationalities based on factors such as GDP, Human Development Index and freedom to travel and settle abroad.

Kälin was the lead consultant in the creation and implementation of the citizenship-by-investment program of Antigua and Barbuda in 2013. In 2014, Kälin was appointed chairman of Henley & Partners following many years in different senior roles at the firm.

In 2006, Kälin published the first edition of the Switzerland Business & Investment Handbook, a comprehensive guide to doing business in Switzerland that is said to be found in every Swiss embassy around the world. In the same year, he created the Henley Passport Index, which ranks countries according to the travel freedom their citizens enjoy due to their passport.

In 2006, Kälin restructured the Saint Kitts and Nevis citizenship-by-investment program, and obtained exclusive rights for Henley to market St. Kitts and Nevis worldwide. The company gave the country's government a $20,000 fee for every successful applicant for its passport program. Applicants for passports could either invest in real state on the islands or donate to the Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation, which was intended to invest on behalf of the St. Kitts and Nevis population. The contract between Henley and Partners and St. Kitts and Nevis ended in 2013. In 2014, the US and Canada flagged that St. Kitts and Nevis had allowed financial criminals and individuals evading sanctions to obtain passports through the Henley and Partners program; Canada ended its visa-free agreement with St. Kitts and Nevis. In 2015, the head of an International Monetary Fund mission to St. Kitts and Nevis said that the citizenship-by-investment program improved by Kälin led to the country out-performing other Caribbean nations in its recovery from the global financial crisis.

In 1994 he joined Henley & Partners, initially as a consultant. There, he pioneered the concept of "citizenship by investment", whereby people can acquire citizenship in return for investing in a country of which they are not a national. Kälin makes a distinction between citizenship that can be "earned" through investment that is economically beneficial to a country, and "commodified" citizenship which can be simply bought, claiming that only the former method can be seen as legitimate. He also considers that "citizenship is inherently unjust".

Christian H. Kälin or Kaelin (born 1971) is a Swiss lawyer, an author, and the chairman of Henley & Partners, an architect of citizenship-by-investment programs that allow wealthy individuals to obtain additional passports. Dubbed the "Passport King" by the media, he is credited with making citizenship by investment "a legitimate, largely above-board industry".

Kälin was born in 1971 in Zürich. In his teenage years, he began collecting immigration and citizenship laws from different countries, writing to embassies to request copies of their legislation and keeping the documents in a big binder. He told writer and journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian of this time in his life: "What always fascinated me was the inclusionary and exclusionary aspect of citizenship .... I wanted to understand how different countries handled this."