“Opposition Leaders Clash Over US Travel Ban: Is Caribbean CBI Programme the Core Issue?”
St Lucia’s opposition leader Allen Chastanet says there is evidence that the CIP-CBI programmes in this region have been operated by bad actors, have been corrupt, and have not adhered to the necessary governance structures; furthermore, the governments have not reacted sufficiently to eliminate those bad practices.
Speaking at the NDP’s press conference on Wednesday, Chastanet and SVG’s opposition leader, Godwin Friday, differed on why the US is proposing a travel ban on 36 countries, including four Caribbean countries which operate the CBI programme.
Friday, in answering questions from the media, said, while the US has a right to protect its borders, he does not believe that the CBI programme is the main reason for the Trump administration’s proposed travel ban. Chastanet, however, strongly disagreed, asserting that the travel ban proposal is significantly linked to the CBI, particularly for the four countries and the Eastern Caribbean that were identified.
“In a large part, it has to do with the lack of regulations and bad actors” It’s been difficult for many individuals to really appreciate what the US’s two major concerns are. One is money laundering. So the fact is that there has been proof that’s been provided out there. St Kitts has done it. Dominica and Grenada have done it. Persons are underpaying the statute amount for the citizenship. And once you do that, it means that the monies of the programmes are now all corrupted, and it becomes an AML issue because the monies are going through the correspondent banks in the U.S.”
“Two, that we would have seen in recent times, several high-profile criminals that have been arrested, either in the UK, in Europe or in the US, and they had secondary passports from OECD countries. Dominica and Saint Kitts in particular”.
Chastanet stated that the US was hoping that the MOA that was signed would have harmonised some of those issues because, in essence, what’s been happening has been a race to the bottom in order to be able to get more sales.
“People are finding shortcuts around it all. These are our making. And I think that the US and the UK and the Europeans would have thought all the warnings that they’ve been giving would have been sufficient to cause the governments to have reformed, but not all of them have. In the case of Dominica, Dominica has lost its visa-free access to the UK”.
Chastanet said there are 36 countries on this list, and while the U.S. is saying there are options, he is not so sure that that would have applied specifically to Caribbean CBI countries given the size of the populations.
“However, America has always been, sadly, a quid pro quo country, and you can negotiate a lot of things by having an arrangement. And I think that the current administration is very much involved in those kinds of negotiations.”
“I can only say that we should focus on what we can control. The fact is that there is evidence to show that these programmes have been running in this region with bad actors; they have been corrupt, and they have not followed the governance structures that they ought to have followed, and our governments have not reacted sufficiently in thwarting out those bad practices.”
Chastanet said if his party is re-elected in Saint Lucia, their intention is to bring and harmonise the CIP programme under one programme to stop the current level of competition among the countries; however, if other CBI countries do not agree to such, we would alter our programme.
“We would change the program significantly and adopt a residency programme for it, meaning the persons would have to reside in the country before they could obtain any form of citizenship. But more importantly, we would seriously contemplate amending the Basseterre Treaty.”
