Published in the Antigua Observer, 11 months ago

Louis Grech and Joseph Muscat – off to Miami to sell EU passports with Henley & Partners

Read this newspaper report from Antigua, below. I am afraid the situation described there by a member of parliament on the Caribbean island is now happening in Malta, will happen in Malta.

You also need to know what the situation is in St Kitts & Nevis, another Caribbean jurisdiction whose ‘citizenship programme’ was devised and taken over by Henley & Partners.

Those two islands, which make up a single jurisdiction, have a total population of 47,000. With such a minuscule population, most of whom are poorly educated or illiterate, the islands have nothing except their landscape, and no way of making money other than through tourism, acting as a haven for those with suspect intentions, and building flats and houses and selling them to outlanders who won’t even be living there.

They have no other sort of economic development. The citizenship programme developed by Henley & Partners for St Kitts & Nevis is just a way of selling real estate there, because the market can’t sustain itself.

There are ‘government approved’ real estate developments, and if you buy a flat or house in one of them, for as little as USD400,000, you get citizenship of St Kitts & Nevis. Of course, Henley & Partners will say that there are background checks and due diligence to be got through first, but the reality is that only one sort of person wants a St Kitts & Nevis passport.

Maltese passports are worth phenomenally more than St Kitts & Nevis passports, because they give holders the free run of the European Union and the Schengen area, yet this isn’t even reflected in the price, even though Malta itself is going to have to pay a high price for it as our reputation deteriorates through the sale of passports by the same team that sells them in dodgy Caribbean jurisdictions.

In Malta, the programme Henley & Partners has developed does not even include the requirement of being resident in Malta or buying a flat/house here. It certainly does not include the requirement to invest or create jobs, despite the draft law’s misnomer. You give the government of Malta a cheque for EUR650,000 and you get your Maltese passport. The government then uses that cash to pay its bills.

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Gov’t warns of the dangers of economic citizenship programme’s special advisor
By Alicia Simon – Monday, November 19th, 2012

ST JOHN’S, Antigua – An MP warned that government’s special advisor should be cut out of the economic citizenship equation completely.

Member of Parliament for St Peters, Asot Michael, cautioned that government’s involvement with internationally recognised residency and citizenship experts, Henley & Partners, might cost the country millions of dollars in unnecessary fees.

The Zurich-based government advisory firm is listed as a “special advisor” to government and tasked with assisting the administration to draft the policy, create applications and forms for the web site and establish “rigorous” escrow arrangements for funding coming into the scheme.

However, Michael said an advisor for such tasks is unnecessary.

“We have our own intellect in our own civil service here that can do that for us … We don’t need a company to market and promote the programme,” Michael said.

Henley was instrumental in the implementation of the St Kitts & Nevis programme, on which Antigua & Barbuda’s economic citizenship programme is based.

“They are spending millions of dollars in St Kitts on marketing nonsense – the website. We can do the same thing, we don’t need them to do marketing for us,” Michael declared.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer is currently travelling to Dubai to be the keynote speaker at the Global Residence & Citizenship Conference beginning on Wednesday. He would be giving insights into Antigua & Barbuda’s impending programme.