A few days into the New Year, St Lucia’s Prime Minister, Allen Chastanet, suggested that all five of the Eastern Caribbean nations that sell Citizenship by Investment (CBI) should develop a joint approach through the OECS secretariat. His proposal, which is unlikely to be adopted, came amid a flurry of comments that followed a potentially damaging US television report about Caribbean citizenship programmes
The documentary ‘Passports for Sale’, aired on the CBS flagship investigative news programme ‘60 minutes’. Focusing on the CBI programmes of St Kitts, Antigua, and Dominica, it criticised their approach for not being transparent enough, not paying enough attention to due diligence when it came to checking an applicant’s background, and for having, in the past, “attracted among the buyers, a rogue’s gallery of scoundrels, fugitives, tax cheats, and possibly much worse”.
Following the broadcast, Caribbean governments and those involved in selling citizenship
