Antigua & Barbuda – Passports For Sale! (Part 2)

When a nation embarks on selling its passports it puts a price on pride of independence.

When greed continues to overwhelm respectability and the price of passports goes wholesale, the concept of citizenship becomes meaningless.

The ruling party recoiled in righteous indignation. However, after the requisite objections to his proposal and an appropriate lapse of time for the memory to fade, the party in power presented the idea as its own and proceeded to develop it. It was given the semi-respectable name of Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP) and anticipated personal involvement of the applicants in the economy and life of Antigua. Certain protocols of checks and balances were established and oversight was assigned to a small hand-picked group of individuals in the Office of the Prime Minister.

Initially, the results were modest. A photo was published on the front page of the local news with Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer handing an Antiguan Passport to the first CIP citizen, a Syrian businessman "with business interests in Dubai". Immediately thereafter, it was announced that the names of the new citizens would no longer be released to the public, as that was impeding the sale of passports, but would henceforth be made available only to Members of Cabinet, along with a financial accounting of the program on a six-month basis. There is no evidence as to whether such reporting took place.

The CIP was run for about a year before the elections of 2014 reversed the status of the two political parties and "crowned" Gaston Browne as the new Prime Minister of Antiguan & Barbuda.

The Programme immediately went ballistic. During this last year, it has grown exponentially into a number of sub-services, which have not been brought even into the twilight of Parliamentary debate and continue to surprise the public, as these "options" are inevitably exposed through unfortunate, if not criminal, crises.

These revelations include that there are now at least three different levels of the CIP, and that further "services" can be bought, such as waivers on visas into Antigua, temporary residency status, inclusion of family members at a discounted price and without separate due diligence, and other similar goodies that facilitate travel for the buyer of "easy entry" and do not appear on any official government accounts.

As qualifying requirements become more varied and less stringent, in spite of the Prime Minister's continued assurance that the US...