St. Vincent joins other small islands in selling golden passports

Despite visa revocations as punishment and warnings from the US, yet another Eastern Caribbean Community nation (OECS) is preparing to offer citizenship and local passports to foreigners for a price.

Under the recently defeated Unity Labor Party (ULP), St. Vincent and The Grenadines had stoutly refused to offer the citizenship by investment program (CIP) to foreigners who can afford to pay the average minimum fee of $100,000.

Now, Prime Minister Goodwin Friday’s National Democratic Party (NDP) says the archipelago needs all the money it can garner for development purposes because the country is almost broke. Once rolled out very soon, as he said on a local radio program on Friday, generated money will be used to reduce the national debt of nearly $1 billion and to fund the establishment of a new national development bank. The debt ratio to the gross domestic product is 113%, Friday said.

He contended that his five-month-old administration badly needs to stimulate economic growth and raise revenue as “seed funding” for the development bank. Such a facility would support lending to small and medium sized enterprises and other entities. The PM argued that revenue from the CIP will actually serve as interest-free money to the bank to on-lend to businesses, which currently struggle to raise money from commercial banks and other sources.

In the OECS sub-grouping, for example, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia, Dominica, and Grenada have long established CIP programs, which they say have earned them millions annually for development purposes.

For them, money from the sale of so-called golden passports replaces port taxes from free trade in the CARICOM bloc as well as revenues lost from the collapse of the sugar and banana export regimes to the European Union over the decades. CIP money will go towards “paying down our massive debt,” the PM stated.

The announcement comes as the US and other western nations continue to warn participating nations that they are uncomfortable with the schemes because these have allegedly allowed people with dubious backgrounds to travel as locals, enjoying visa free access to more than 100 countries around the world while passing as local citizens.

The result is that the US has invoked tourist visa suspensions for nationals of Dominica and Antigua while placing Grenada on a list of countries whose nationals must lodge visa bond fees of up to $15,000 to apply for a visitor’s visa. The US has made it clear that the visa suspensions are linked to the passport sale scheme.

Just recently, neighboring Dominica revoked passport and citizenship privileges to a few Iranian nationals after discovering they had misrepresented information on applications and also because of their links to key players in the Iranian regime.

Friday has described the CIP as a flagship scheme to help spur development.