Caribbean Leaders Face Mounting Questions Over Citizenship by Investment Programmes as EU Deadline Looms
When the CBI Money Stops: The OECS at a Crossroads
The European Union has written to the governments of the Eastern Caribbean member states that operate Citizenship by Investment programmes and told them the programmes must be wound down by June 2028. That correspondence had been circulating quietly among regional leaders for some time. Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne is the one who chose to make it public, informing his constituents of the ultimatum and its deadline. Until his disclosure, no OECS government had spoken openly to its citizens about what the EU was demanding.
That deadline framed a wide ranging conversation on this week’s edition of This Week in Interview, hosted by Anthony Drigo on TDN Radio. Drigo and I traced the origins of the CBI programmes, the (revenue) sums (the program) they have produced, the structural dependencies (program) they have created inside government budgets, and the response issued by six Prime Ministers who convened in Dominica on July 10 to address the EU ultimatum.
The picture that emerged was not encouraging.
Drigo opened the programme by pointing to the correspondence that first made the deadline public.
“We saw a release, a letter from the Prime Minister of Antigua, Gaston Browne, where he informed his constituents that they had received communication from the European Union regarding Antigua’s Citizenship by Investment programme,” Drigo said. “The EU has written a strong letter to these governments that they need to phase that programme out by (June 1) 2028.”
He then invited me to sketch the ground for viewers who may not fully understand the stakes.
The programmes remain poorly understood by the very citizens who depend on them. That is where I began.
“A lot of folks in the region hear about the Citizenship by Investment programme and maybe do not have a good grasp or understanding as to what this is all about,” I told the audience. “You hear the government side of it where they say the programme provides support for various infrastructural programmes in the islands. But to the extent to which the average citizen fully understands what is involved, I will paint a brief perspective.”
Five OECS member states currently operate such programmes. St. Kitts and Nevis. Dominica. Antigua and Barbuda. Grenada. Saint Lucia. St. Vincent and the Grenadines does not have one, though its newly elected Prime Minister (Dr.) Godwin Friday has signalled some interest in eventually establishing one.
St. Kitts and Nevis introduced the first such programme in 1984, one year after gaining independence. That gives the twin island federation more than four decades of experience with it. Dominica followed in 1993 under the Freedom Party administration of Dame Eugenia Charles. Antigua and Barbuda and Grenada each launched theirs in 2013. Saint Lucia most recently, in 2015.
In Dominica’s case, the original programme carried a different name.
“It was established against the backdrop of economic challenges and was intended as a means of attracting foreign capital while minimizing the need for additional public borrowing,” I explained on the programme. “Dominica’s economy was heavily dependent on agriculture, particularly bananas. There were growing concerns about the vulnerability of a single crop economy.”
The World Trade Organization’s intervention in the 1990s stripped Caribbean bananas of preferential access to the European market. That, combined with external shocks of the same period, pushed policymakers to look for non traditional revenue.
“As a result the government sought alternatives, non traditional sources of revenue,” I said. “It was expected that the funds would help support national development projects, improve infrastructure, stimulate private sector investment and strengthen government finances. It was intended to reduce dependency on borrowing, international loans, commercial borrowing and increased taxation.”
Two years after the Freedom Party introduced the programme, the United Workers Party won office in 1995 and continued it. The Labour Party assumed power in 2000 and has held it since. The programme has evolved considerably in those twenty six years.
Drigo asked whether the shift from Economic Citizenship Programme to Citizenship by Investment Programme signified more than a cosmetic revision.
It did.
“The first name had ‘economic’ in it. The emphasis was on the economy,” I told him. “When it became Citizenship by Investment, the underlying word became ‘investment.’ Anyone who does an investment expects a certain return on his or her investment.”
Others may read the change differently. I understand that. What I can say without hesitation is that the structure of the programme has changed. The naming of the programme has changed. The intent of the programme has changed.
“When the programme was initiated by the Dominica Freedom Party, all of the revenue generated from the programme was coming to Dominica’s Treasury Consolidated Fund,” I said. That is no longer the case.
Whatever one makes of the philosophical shift, the more urgent question is how deeply the region’s public finances now rely on the revenue this programme produces. This is classified as non tax revenue, separate from income tax, licences, and duties. In some cases it now accounts for as much as 60 percent of a government’s recurrent revenue.
I offered a comparison for the audience.
“If you have a shop and you’re selling bread, when you count your money, every one hundred dollars you make, sixty dollars comes from selling bread,” I said.
Drigo followed the analogy through.
“The other forty cents comes from everything else,” the host observed.
“What that says is there’s a heavy dependency on that revenue,” I replied.
The question then becomes what happens to a government that suddenly loses that share of its (revenue) income.
“If government is projecting six hundred million dollars in revenue, and more than half of that comes from CBI, if by some circumstance you are not able to generate that revenue, how are you going to pay for your services at the hospital?” I asked. “How are you going to maintain infrastructure? How are you going to pay public servants? How are they going to pay the National Employment Programme workers? How are they going to make sure the hospital is fully equipped? Make sure the roads are maintained? Make sure the schools have supplies?”
Herein lies the problem.
Drigo pointed to the visible achievements the current administration in Dominica cites when defending the programme. Housing developments. Hotels. He asked me to walk viewers through the evolution.
I was careful to say I am not against housing.
“They restructured the programme and had what is called a housing option,” I said. “I’m not opposed to that, but I’m opposed to the manner in which it is done.”
On tourism developments the record is genuinely mixed.
“We do have some success stories,” I said, citing Jungle Bay Resort as one. “But you also have some very dismal stories. Several hotels that have started and are yet to be completed. They’re just sitting there like white elephants.”
Questions of due diligence have followed the programme for years. Court proceedings in New York have produced claims about payments related to Dominican passports. The accountability of the funds is also the subject of ongoing litigation in Dominica.
The recurring theme, Drigo and I agreed, is that Dominicans have not been shown detailed accounts of how the money has been spent. The international airport is one example.
“They talk about geothermal. Geothermal from what I understand that’s borrowing,” I said. “The airport they say is being financed by the CBI. Again there’s no transparency or proof on that to show, hey, this is how much money out of the CBI has gone into it and these are the returns. I’m not aware that any Dominican can go anywhere and pull on any government website or any government office and look at the plans of the airport, what it looks like, what it will look like when it finishes, how much money has been spent to date.”
One of the arrangements I raised on the programme has, since the broadcast, warranted further explanation. On air I referenced a lease arrangement that struck me as almost impossible to believe when I first heard about it. I had checked with a source before speaking publicly because I could not initially accept the figure.
“The guys have a 999 year lease,” I said on the programme. “Not a 99. 999. Are you hearing me now?”
Drigo suggested the length might be a typographical error. I had asked precisely to be sure it was not.
The project in question is the $54 million aerial tram, or cable car, being developed in Dominica. The lead investor and owner is ABL Holdings, which is spearheading the logistical execution of the project in collaboration with the Dominican government (and fully financed from the CBI Program). The feasibility study and system design were carried out by the Swiss firm Outdoor Engineers AG, with an emphasis on sustainable eco tourism. The Austrian ropeway manufacturer Doppelmayr Group is building the actual system. When completed, the installation is intended to span 6.6 kilometres and to become the longest mono cable car in the world. The project is being constructed in the designated UNESCO World Heritage National Park of Dominica.
The engineering ambition is real. The lease term attached to it is what should give every Dominican pause.
A 999 year lease effectively grants a company near permanent rights to government owned land. The security of tenure this creates for the developer is not something a shorter term arrangement could match. That security in turn encourages substantial capital investment and long term financing. A 999 year lease is easily mortgageable. It allows the company to use the property as collateral to raise loans or attract additional investors. For all practical business purposes it is treated much like outright freehold ownership. There is no escalating ground rent, no periodic renegotiation, no depreciation curve of the sort that shorter 99 year leases carry.
That describes what the developer gets. What is easier to lose sight of is what the government gives up on behalf of the citizens who will follow (and the fact that this project is being fully financed from CBI funds).
The government relinquishes functional control over the land for nearly a millennium. No future administration, no future generation of Dominicans, can reclaim the property for public use, for urban redevelopment, or for any strategic purpose the country may one day identify. Where a freehold sale would at least provide immediate capital, and where a shorter lease would allow rents to be periodically adjusted upward, a 999 year lease at a nominal rate forfeits decades of future income. If the company becomes defunct or fails to develop the property to its potential, the government is often locked into a complex legal battle simply to reclaim what was, in principle, its own land.
Restrictive covenants embedded in the lease can dictate zoning, environmental standards, or the character of the site. That is one modest tool the government retains. It is not adequate compensation for handing away the land itself for a thousand years.
When Drigo asked why I felt the need to double check the figure, my answer was straightforward. I could not accept, on first hearing, that any representative of a Dominican government would sit at a table and sign such an agreement. Yet the arrangement stands.
For comparison, I noted on the programme that the geothermal project involves a 25 year lease. Twenty five years is itself a long time, and geothermal technology has a known operational life. The country will be marking its 75th anniversary of independence, or thereabouts, before that agreement is handed back. But 25 years and 999 years belong to different moral universes.
The conversation on air turned to the July 10 meeting of OECS Heads of Government held in Dominica. It was chaired by Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit and attended by Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre of Saint Lucia, Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda, Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell of Grenada, Prime Minister Terrance Drew of St. Kitts and Nevis, and Prime Minister Dr. Godwin Friday of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The meeting produced a lengthy communique. I read portions of it on air.
“Recognizing the importance of preserving economic stability and development gains achieved through Citizenship by Investment programmes, the heads of government have agreed that discussions with the European Union should also encompass opportunities for enhanced development cooperation, strategic investment partnerships, climate resilience financing, economic diversification initiatives and other appropriate support measures capable of strengthening long term economic resilience and facilitating any future arrangements that may be agreed between the parties,” I quoted.
I found the tone of the communique disheartening.
To place the request in context, I offered estimates of the revenue the programmes have generated over the past decade. St. Kitts and Nevis earned somewhere between four and six billion United States dollars from its programme between 2015 and 2025. Dominica between 2.5 and 3.5 billion. Antigua and Barbuda between 1.2 and 1.8 billion. Grenada between 1 and 1.5 billion. Saint Lucia, which has been in the programme for only eleven years, between 400 and 700 million.
“With that kind of money generated over that period,” I asked, “the EU now must facilitate them in the areas that they have identified? My question is, when you get to the table of the EU, and you’re basically saying to the EU, help bail us out because if you tell us to stop this program, we can’t stop this thing, what are you coming to the table with?”
Drigo pressed the same point. The region has the capacity to generate substantial revenue in the time still available to it. It should be applying that revenue toward the very sectors named in the communique.
“They’ve identified what, five areas where they would go to the EU for cooperation,” Drigo said. He read them back. “Enhanced development cooperation, strategic investment partnership, climate resilience financing, economic diversification initiative, and other appropriate support measures.”
He then framed his argument in fiscal terms.
“That’s on average a billion dollars a year that comes into the region,” Drigo said of the CBI revenue. “Why can they look at the same things that they’re going to go to the European Union for and say, you know what, guys, we have the opportunity to bring in an additional billion dollars to the region in the next year. Let’s look at those five areas.”
Nowhere in the communique, Drigo said, did the leaders indicate they intended to use the remaining life of the programme to prepare their own economies for its absence.
“So we don’t see any type of responsibility, accountability, ownership of the development of the region being assumed by the governments of the region, and that is sad,” he said.
I agreed, and returned to what strikes me as the great missed opportunity of the past two decades. A regional development fund.
“Had they for example put just five percent of that money aside, or ten percent, into what one might consider or call maybe a development fund, an OECS regional development fund, sovereignty fund, whatever you want to call it,” I said, “then you could now say to the EU, look, over the period of that programme we have established a fund of X amount, and this is what is in our fund, and we recognize you want us to stop the programme, but in order to do that you would have to help support or supplement the fund that we have.”
The OECS already has much of the institutional architecture such a fund would require. A common currency pegged to the United States dollar. A regional central bank. A cooperation framework.
“The fact that they can come together to take a common approach towards the programme, why was it they could not have come together previously and take a common approach towards revenue generating for the programme and to deal with stuff like disaster preparedness and recovery,” I asked.
The money could have gone toward climate resilience projects. Renewable energy investment. Food security. Regional transportation. Education and research. Emergency fiscal support after natural disasters. The list of things the region needs and does not have is not a mystery to anyone who lives here.
Drigo offered two examples he considered instructive. Secret Bay. Jungle Bay. Both Dominican tourism properties. Both involved partnerships with Dominicans. Both have produced lasting employment, local sourcing of produce, and the transfer of skills to young workers.
“There are Dominicans working there,” he said of Jungle Bay. “You can see a lot of the produce that is used there for meals come from the local farmers, the local livestock farmers, as well as vegetables and provisions. I saw a lot of skills transfer. So we have examples of how the Citizenship by Investment programme could have been successfully deployed.”
I contrasted this with the country’s failure to build a water industry despite abundant supply.
“Had these guys in Dominica’s case used some of that funds from the CBI, we could have had a thriving water industry business,” I said. “We could have taken that money, invest in a proper water industry business, build some dams, do some water bottling, some water export, and be the country within the OECS and the Caribbean exporter of water.”
Saint Lucia and Barbados have faced water challenges in recent years. Dominica sits with rain in abundance and no industry to speak of built around it.
I drew on recent remarks by Mark A. G. Brantley, Leader of the Opposition of St. Kitts and Nevis and Premier of Nevis. His recent article on the subject carried the title The Death of Citizenship by Investment in the OECS. I read his closing thought aloud on the programme.
“There is no one who is coming to save the Caribbean,” I quoted. “The EU is not coming to save us. America is not coming to save us. The British, nobody is coming to save us.”
The parallel with the banana industry is difficult to avoid.
“We saw what happened with our bananas,” I said. “Nobody saved us. As a result bananas went away gradually. One of the major revenue earning exports that we had in Dominica, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and the islands, and nobody saved us. And the same thing is going to happen this time around.”
Drigo described the situation as a poor reflection on the region’s political leadership and on the electorate that produced it.
“Governments are not dropped on us from the sky or from heaven,” he said. “Governments are a reflection of the people. There is something wrong with our sub region if we have six Prime Ministers come to a conference to address something that they consider to be serious, and the only solution they seem to propose is to look outside the region and say, help us, if you don’t help us we’re going to sink.”
He offered a warning by way of a local comparison.
“If anybody wants to know what happens to an economy when it suddenly loses sixty percent of its revenue generating activity, go to Portsmouth in Dominica,” Drigo said. “Portsmouth lost Ross University and when you walk through the place the place is a ghost town. With the loss of the CBI the impact is going to be similar, except it’s going to be on a national and a regional scale.”
I raised a further concern about Dominica’s public finances. The country’s public debt now stands at close to 1.6 to 1.7 billion dollars. The debt to GDP ratio sits at around 90 percent, well above the 60 percent benchmark established within the OECS. The National Bank of Dominica is currently owed approximately 400 million dollars by the government, much of it in the form of overdraft facilities and borrowing for various projects.
The international airport is the other pressing question. If CBI revenue dries up before the airport is completed, what happens then?
“We can very well have the international airport completed and finished, and everything, runway, building, terminal, the whole nine yards, but the airport has to be maintained,” I said. “The lights have to be running, the electricity, the staffing, supplies. So if we even have the airport complete but our revenue base is not sufficient to allow us the monies needed to provide the upkeep and maintenance and supplies for the airport, we’re in a serious problem.”
An airport that cannot be run is like a luxury car that cannot be serviced or fuelled. Impressive to look at. Useless in practice.
The loss of visa free access to the European Union, which was the principal draw for many holders of Dominican passports, has already changed the calculation for applicants. Dominicans themselves are facing new travel restrictions. A temporary United States visa suspension expired on June 30 with no clear public statement from the government about whether it had been extended, suspended, or replaced with something else.
Both Drigo and I returned in our closing remarks to the theme of transparency. The fact that the July 10 meeting produced no press conference in Dominica, and no press briefing at which reporters could put questions to the six Prime Ministers, was itself telling.
“You bring all the Prime Ministers to Dominica to have a meeting, but you’ve not even done a press conference, you’ve not done a press release, you’ve not said anything about the CBI programme to the people of Dominica who are going to be affected,” Drigo said.
He is right about that.
“The CBI belongs to the people,” I said. “It’s not your private company that you have and the board of directors of that private company decide to have a meeting in Dominica. You’re discussing the people’s business. Why didn’t they feel it transparent enough to have a discussion with the media?”
Drigo closed by urging listeners in Dominica to register on the voters list ahead of the next general election, and to think carefully about the kind of country they want to see as the fiftieth anniversary of independence approaches in 2028.
“What type of healthcare system, quality of health, education, employment, what type of industries we want to see, what type of land ownership we want to see in our country,” he asked. “Are we going to be so broke that folks can come from wherever and buy the land from under us?”
Whatever emerges from the coming negotiations with the European Union, the citizens of the region will feel the consequences most directly.
“When that forty to fifty percent non tax revenue is no longer available, it means that when the Dominican walks into the China Friendship Hospital and is told, sorry, we are short on supplies, when the NEP workers are short, when the houses that have been built for the citizens of Dominica cannot be maintained because there’s no money in the budget, and we don’t have a replacement because we don’t have any productive sector generating sufficient revenue to support that shortfall, then we’re in chaos,” I said on the programme.
I stand by every word of that.
Neither Drigo nor I offered a prediction of what agreement, if any, may emerge before the reported 2028 deadline. What we left our audience with instead was a set of questions about preparation, transparency, and accountability that our governments have yet to answer.
The window for answering them is narrowing.
You can watch the full episode here.
Author’s Note: For the sake of accuracy, not every Caribbean country operates a Citizenship by Investment programme. Several others run similar arrangements under different names and different administrative frameworks. This article focuses on the five OECS member states whose programmes fall within the scope of the European Union’s June 2028 deadline.