Real News – Greed is what has put the country’s Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP) at risk, says D.Gisele Isaac, chairman of the United Progressive Party (UPP).
Antigua and Barbuda’s visa-free access to the United Kingdom might be in jeopardy in the near future because of concerns over its CIP.
Accordingly, Isaac is disagreeing with Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, who says that Caribbean countries do not have the machinery to conduct proper due diligence on CIP applicants.
Rather, Isaac says, it is the desperation for money – and not the lack of proper mechanisms – that has now placed the country in a precarious situation.
Isaac says the Gaston Browne Administration has taken too many chances and made too many glaring errors in not probing applicants’ business history and character, simply because it is more interested in the money.
The UPP chairman recounts the incident in which a Chinese woman had indicated she was withdrawing from the programme because of due-diligence challenges – but was allowed to obtain a CIP passport because she had already paid her application fees.
Isaac also cites the more recent incident involving passports being made in St. Vincent and asks who, exactly, were receiving those travel documents.
She believes that these were – or are – persons who did not qualify to get them through legitimate means.
Isaac notes that, for the past several years, much was not known about the CIP since the Government refused to report to the people on the initiative.
Based on all this, she says, the country may well eventually lose visa- free access to the UK, as was the case with Canada – again because of greedy politicians.
Antigua and Barbuda has boasted, in the past, that its due diligence machinery is excellent and that the United States was assisting in conducting checks and vetting potential applicants.
This, however, turned out not to be the case.
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