My top 10 beefs with Citizenship by Investment: Part 1

by S Brian Samuel

I have 10 major beefs with Grenada’s Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programme: the first 5 are general, plus 5 more relating to specific projects.

Today, we’ll look at my general beefs:

1. The whole concept is wrong. The first time I heard of Citizenship by Investment, I was stunned: you can buy a passport? Isn’t that contrary to principles of citizenship and nationality, not to mention common sense? The very thought of selling Grenadian passports smacks me as just … wrong. Not only wrong, it’s destined to appeal to ‘the wrong sort’ of applicants. All my life I’ve had hassles travelling on a Grenadian passport: cumbersome visa procedures, doubtful immigration, dubious customs. So, the thought of someone paying, $150,000 and upwards, to travel on my passport — what kind of pariah country must they come from? And, with our passport-selling agencies more interested in big numbers over deep due diligence, one has to wonder: to whom are we opening our borders?
2. It’s a flawed financing model. In my 20-year career with the World Bank, I’ve financed my fair share of hotels, including the original La Source, in 1990. It’s not rocket science: an investor has an idea, develops it, puts money into it, borrows more money to make it happen, then hopes to make enough profits over its lifetime, to pay off the loan and come out ahead. But CBI doesn’t work that way, because there’s a break in the economic chain. The people who ‘invest’ in the hotel/villa aren’t too bothered about its future profitability — they’re buying a passport, anything else is gravy. This is a recipe for the creation of white elephants, built with passport money: ill-conceived, poorly located mega-resorts, most of them empty. Case in point: St Kitts is littered with empty villas and condos, that will never be occupied. But the ‘owners’ don’t care, because they didn’t buy a villa; they bought a passport. It’s a no-brainer: if I can buy a passport for $150,000, but for an extra $50,000 I’ll get a villa thrown into the deal — why not? The result is empty villas, lonely hotels, missing money.
3. It puts billions into the hands of the worst businesspeople: politicians. Worldwide, politicians are famously bad at business, the list of failed government projects is long and exotic: highways to nowhere, empty airports, empty stadiums, it goes on. In spending the government’s money, correction: in spending our money, there’s nothing a politician loves more than a slush fund, and CBI is the granddaddy of all slush funds. And what do our leaders spend this CBI windfall on? As usual, they can only think of one thing: hotels. Not just hotels: mega-hotels; Grenada has embarked on a massive mega-resort building programme, which even before Covid-19 were of highly questionable viability, and now have even more dubious prospects. Grand Anse, Mount Hartman, La Sagesse, Levera; 4 billion here, 5 billion there, you can’t keep up, your head spins. Are you telling me that Grenada has the capacity, the land, the people, the infrastructure, the water, the electricity, the ports — to support $10 billion of investment? Do you think we’re that stupid? Or are we actually that stupid?

In projecting their future path for Grenada, must our leaders always be so myopic? Just imagine the places these windfall CBI funds could be invested: education, agriculture, healthcare, even heritage tourism. In my banking days, I would never have approved a loan for most of these ultra-optimistic passport schemes. You cannot turn a niche destination into a mass-market gulag, just because you’ve got billions of passport dollars to play with. Do our politicians get the message? Of course not.

4. It lacks transparency, with minimal background checks. Grenada’s CBI website lists the various fees and costs of buying a passport, but it contains no data on the benefits accrued to Grenada. Finance Minister Gregory Bowen recently said that the Grenada Government received US$30.6 million in CBI inflows in 2021, from 170 applicants into the National Transformation Fund (NTF), at an average of US$180,000 per applicant. The total amount of new passports approved was 437, with the remaining 267 granted through investments in ‘approved projects’. This is where the trail grows cold: no one knows where this money was spent — or wasn’t.

Judging by Kawana Bay, that unfinished eyesore that currently blights Grenada’s premier beach, Grand Anse, and the ongoing lawsuits that haunt this project, all is not well with Grenada’s CBI programme. There’s a Jamaican saying: “Tief from tief, God laugh” which perfectly characterises the current mudslinging between the Prime Minister and his former favourite and Ambassador-at-Large, Warren Newfield. Or as my father would have put it: you can’t swim in a dirty pond and come out clean. And with the sorry state of our scandal-ridden CBI, Grenada is viewed as unclean — very.

In addition to murky finances, we also attract murky applicants; at this very moment, multimillion-dollar scammer Proshanta Kumar Halder languishes in a Bangladeshi jail, holder of a Grenadian passport, among others. Fraudster Charles Liu was still travelling on a Grenada diplomatic passport, 5 years after being charged by the US Securities Exchange Commission for defrauding millions of dollars from investors. Quizzed in 2021 about Liu, Grenada’s Prime Minister said: “I know he had some difficulties and that’s where it is as far as I know.” That’s as far as you know? This man is in the global news, for all the wrong reasons, is indicted in a US Federal Court, yet he continues to travel on a Grenadian diplomatic passport — and that’s as far as you know?

This shocking lack of even the most basic due diligence characterises all levels of Grenada’s programme, starting, evidently, at the very top. “According to the data, 1,272 applicants were granted citizenship during the fourth quarter (of 2021), while another 24 were denied.” Wow, that’s some success rate, are we to believe that fully 98% of all passport applicants are upstanding, unblemished citizens of their home countries? So why do they want to buy an expensive Grenadian passport? When our government’s prime objective is to sell as many passports as possible, and due diligence is done by the same private companies that sell the passports; this is a clear conflict of interest, otherwise known as a recipe for disaster. I’ve instigated a few due diligence investigations in my time, it’s a very exact science. You need to hire the professionals, like Kroll, they’ll dig out the dirt, no matter how well hidden. But they’re not cheap, and you think our profit-hungry passport-sellers will go through that extra expense? Of course not. With some of the shady characters that somehow qualify for Grenadian citizenship, we can only conclude that our ‘due diligence’ consists of no more than a Google search and a quick look at their Facebook page.

If 1,272 new passports were issued in the 4^th quarter of 2021 alone, this begs the question: how many passports have been issued, in total, since the commencement of CBI, way back in the 1990s – ten thousand? Twenty? These ‘new Grenadians’ may now purchase real estate without paying Alien Landholding Tax, in a small island with an already overheated market. What if some future government decides to allow overseas voting? CBI passport-holders could become a major voting bloc, able to influence local politics. What if there’s a meltdown in their home country, and thousands of passport holders decide, en masse, to relocate to Grenada? After all, that’s one of their prime objectives in buying our passport: a safe haven, and it doesn’t get safer and more pleasant than our precious little island. Do we have the capacity, the land, the infrastructure, to absorb them? Without displacing ourselves in the process? Have we thought about these potential game-changers: the demographic, economic and political consequences for our, repeat, precious little island?

5. We’re playing with visa fire. Do you remember the good old days, when we didn’t need a visa to enter Canada? But Canada imposed visa requirements on Grenada, specifically citing abuses to our CBI programme as the reason. Canada did the same to Antigua and Barbuda in 2017, for the same reason. It gets worse: ‘Both the EU and the US are considering legislation that will penalise Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts, and St Lucia if they do not end their Citizenship by Investment (CBI) schemes.’ The message couldn’t be any clearer. And if I were to need a visa to visit the UK and Europe, I would be livid at whichever government caused this to happen. As we all should be.

These are my ‘beefs-in-principle’: major concerns about the concept and implementation of Grenada’s CBI programme. PS: this is not just idle speculation on my part; CBI has the capacity to critically affect every single Grenadian — even more than it already has. It affects the ability of every Grenadian to travel, unhindered by onerous visa requirements and suspicions because of our nationality. The ability of young Grenadians to buy reasonably priced middle-class housing, without being priced out by cash-rich CBI investors. The ability of Grenadians, ultimately, to run our own affairs, to maintain our own sovereignty; the same sovereignty that our ancestors fought and died to achieve, for us. And we’re going to turn around and sell that? In principle, and even more in practice, CBI ticks all my wrong boxes, and should give every single Grenadian pause to seriously reflect, about the dangers of this programme.

Let me close on this question: where is the national debate, on this critical issue? We know what the ruling party thinks of CBI — what of the opposition? I haven’t heard a policy statement from them on CBI, if anyone has, please guide me to it.

Next week, part 2: project-specific beefs …