St. Lucia’s Opposition Leader says Proposed U.S. Travel Ban Is Largely Related to CBI

By Admin. Updated 1:06 p.m., Thursday, 19 June 2025, Atlantic Standard Time (GMT-4).

St. Lucia’s Opposition Leader, Allen Chastanet, has stated that the recent consideration by the U.S. Government to impose travel bans on several Eastern Caribbean countries is largely connected to their Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programmes.

In a report dated 14 June, The Washington Post revealed that it had reviewed an internal memo from the U.S. State Department, which sets a 60-day deadline for 36 nations to comply with certain requirements or face a full or partial entry ban to the United States.

The memo, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and sent on Saturday to U.S. diplomats working with the countries, lists several nations, including four Caribbean states—Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Lucia—all of which operate CBI programmes.

At a joint press conference held on 18 June with St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ Opposition Leader, Dr. Godwin Friday, Mr. Chastanet responded to a journalist’s question, saying:

“So, in part, the ban that’s being proposed has a lot to do with CIP, particularly for the four countries in the Eastern Caribbean that were identified. And in a large part, it has to do with the lack of regulations and bad actors.”

“It’s been difficult for a lot of persons to really appreciate what the U.S.’s two major concerns are. One is money laundering. So the fact is that there has been proof that’s been provided out there: St. Kitts has done it; Dominica, Grenada has done it.”

“That persons are underpaying the statute amount for their citizenship. And once you do that, it means that the monies of the programmes are now all corrupted. And it becomes an AML issue because the monies are going through the correspondent banks in the U.S. Two, that we would have seen in recent times several high-profile criminals that have been arrested either in the U.K., in Europe, or in the U.S., and they had secondary passports from OECS countries, Dominicans and St. Kitts in particular.”

The former Prime Minister, speaking at the press conference in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), added:

“The U.S. was hoping that the MOA that was signed would have harmonised some of those issues because, in essence, what’s been happening has been a race to the bottom. In order to be able to get more sales, people are finding shortcuts around it. All these are our own making.”

“And I think that the U.S. and the U.K. and the Europeans would have thought all the warnings that they’ve been giving, so in the case of Dominica, Dominica has lost its visa-free access to the U.K., that those would have been sufficient to cause the governments to have reformed, but not all of them have. In the case of the U.S. government saying that if you take persons, they would renegotiate, remember, there’s 36 countries on this list. And I’m not so sure that that would have applied specifically to the OECS countries, given the size of our own populations, but America has always been, sadly, a quid pro quo country, and you can negotiate a lot of things by having an arrangement.”

Mr. Chastanet urged the region to focus on what it can control:

“And I think that the current administration is very much involved in those kinds of negotiations. I only can say that we should focus on what we can control. The fact is that there is evidence to show that these programmes have been running in this region with bad actors, they have been corrupt, and they have not followed the government structures that they ought to have followed, and our governments have not reacted sufficiently in thwarting out those bad practises.”

Mr. Chastanet expressed his support for CBI (also known as CIP) and stated that if re-elected as St. Lucia’s Prime Minister, his government would harmonise CBI under a single programme.

“We’ve said that if we get re-elected in St. Lucia, that our intention is to bring and harmonise the CIP programme under one programme to stop this level of competition among the countries,” he said.

When asked what his position would be if the other OECS countries did not agree with the harmonisation proposal and whether he would discontinue the programme in St. Lucia, Mr. Chastanet replied:

“We would change the programme significantly and adopt a residency programme to it, meaning that persons would have to reside in the country before they could obtain any form of citizenship.”

He added: “But more importantly, we would seriously contemplate looking to amend” the Treaty of Basseterre.

END