Gregor Nassief, Founder & CEO at Secret Bay Resort & Residences, has written to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit fourteen times over seven years about what he describes as illegal pricing inside Dominica’s citizenship by investment (CBI) program.
On Friday, Nassief held a press conference in Roseau, where he said he would consider litigation if the government continues to leave the matter alone.
The occasion was the leak of his most recent letter, dated June 17 and addressed to Skerrit and Opposition Leader Jesma Paul-Victor. Copies went to Cabinet, all parliamentarians, President Sylvanie Burton, the head of the Financial Intelligence Unit, and the head of the Citizenship by Investment Unit (CBIU).
Nassief said he did not put the letter into circulation himself, and that once it was public he judged an explanation to be in the public interest.
His central claim is narrow and arithmetical. Citizenship, he said, “has been sold at a discount,” a practice he called “contrary to law and contrary to the regulations.”
The Arithmetic That Undercuts The Treasury
Dominica’s regulations recognize two investment routes. Contributions to the Economic Diversification Fund (EDF) run to US$200,000 for a single applicant and US$250,000 for a main applicant with up to three dependants, all of it going to the treasury. Real estate applicants invest US$200,000 in a government-approved project and pay government fees on top, set at US$100,000 for a family of four in the June 2024 gazette.
Nassief walked reporters through both. Under the real estate option, he said, the investor is “getting title for real estate” in exchange for the qualifying portion, with the balance flowing to the treasury as fees. Those two routes, in his account, have “existed and have functioned well for years.”
A third flow is where his objection sits. Between 2016 and 2018, he said, a housing option appeared, joined later by projects tied to the new international airport, and he groups these under what he calls the social infrastructure option. Pricing there runs far below the statutory floor, on his account, and only “about 15 to 20,000 ends up in treasury from these transactions.”
He put the comparison to the room as a single question. “So who is going to pay 250,000 for citizenship for a family of four, when you can get a discounted price, a third party, for effectively half of that?”
Volume then migrates to the cheapest product, which is also the one that returns least to the state. Transactions that belong in the treasury or in the real estate option “are instead all flowing into the discounted scheme,” Nassief said. In his slides the point appeared as a ratio: 100 lawful EDF applications would deliver more revenue to the treasury than 1,000 discounted ones.
What Dominica itself offers, he said, “cannot compete with the discounting that we are allowing to take place, which has been taking place for seven years.” Legitimate developers lose on the same mechanism. He said stalled construction is visible across the island, and declined to identify the projects: “I won’t say who they are.”
Some of the projects caught in that squeeze started discounting themselves, he said, “because they were desperate to compete.” It did not save them. “I have pleaded, begged the country to stop this because of the damage that it is doing to the treasury,” he said.
What The EU Data Show
Dominica does not publish issuance figures at the level Nassief cites, and he was explicit about where his numbers come from. “This data is not transparently disclosed,” he said, attributing the figures to the EU and describing them as an estimate assembled from documented material.
The underlying source is the European Commission’s seventh report under the visa suspension mechanism, which IMI analyzed in December 2024. It records 34,596 Dominican CBI passports issued between 2018 and 2022, a further 9,539 in 2023, and 5,484 in the first half of 2024. Nassief totals those at 49,619 and argues the period outstrips everything the program did before it.
Annual volumes in the early years ran between 500 and 800, on his account, rising to roughly 2,000 by 2017 and 2018. “And look at what happens when the discounting takes hold,” he said. “Now we have a very high-volume, highly discounted citizenship program.”
Seven Years, Fourteen Letters
Secret Bay came to CBI late. Founded in 2011, the resort was approved as a CBI project only in 2019, and he said it was then that the transactions he considers illegal became visible to him. His first letter to Skerrit followed on October 1 that year.
He read part of it aloud. The practices, he wrote in 2019, “should no longer be tolerated.” Left unchecked, they would “like a cancer, eat away at the legitimate organisms of the industry, leaving only those willing to engage in less than ethical practices in a wild race to the bottom.”
Seven years on, his verdict ran to four words: “Nothing has been done.” Letters were not the only channel he tried.
Nassief said he met the Prime Minister “many, many times,” spoke to ministers, and met the President, before concluding that a parliamentary hearing was the only route left. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. “My intention and my efforts have always been to protect the program.”
Roseau has said much the same thing, at least on paper. In October 2018, then CBIU head Emmanuel Nanthan told agents that special offers and discounts were “contrary to law” and instructed them to cease immediately.
The CBIU went further in January 2022, prohibiting any claim that citizenship could be had below the prescribed minimum. Skerrit himself warned in 2024 that legislation would allow the state to revoke citizenships obtained below the legal threshold.
Three Capitals, Three Restrictions
Nassief traces the international measures of the past three years to the same source. Britain revoked visa-free access for Dominican nationals on July 19, 2023, with then Home Secretary Suella Braverman citing “clear and evident abuse” of the program. Washington followed with a December 2025 proclamation imposing partial travel restrictions, then a freeze on immigrant visa processing in January 2026 and a cut in visa validity from ten years to three months.
Brussels went furthest. The European Commission wrote to all five Eastern Caribbean CBI states on June 25 this year requesting that they phase out their programs by June 1, 2028, with a 24-month transition. Skerrit chaired the meeting in Roseau on July 10 at which the five governments agreed on a joint response and a mission to Brussels.
In each case, Nassief said, the stated reason was the CBI program. He offered scale by way of anecdote, recalling a British immigration officer who studied his passport a few years ago and told him, “Wow, you’re the first person I’ve met with a Dominican passport who is actually born in Dominica.”
Then the numbers arrived. “Imagine if five years ago, ten years ago, you had 500 people showing up for immigration in the UK with a Dominican passport, expecting visa-free access. And then a few years after that, that 500 turns to 5,000.”
Consequences have reached him personally. In May he became the first Dominica-based hotelier elected president-elect of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA). Weeks later he was refused renewal of his US visa, a decision he linked to the travel restrictions.
The Shortfalls At Home
Lost revenue shows up in budgets Parliament approves, and the treasury cannot fund, he argued. Tourism marketing, the line he knows best, receives roughly a fifth of what legislators vote for it.
Dominica’s exposure is not in dispute. The country’s 2025/2026 budget projected that 56.7% of recurrent revenue would come from CBI, according to the opposition Dominica Freedom Party. Against that sit non-CBI recurrent revenue of EC$456.2 million (approximately US$169 million) and recurrent spending of EC$679.9 million (approximately US$252 million).
Parliament approved the 2026/2027 budget days before he spoke. Finance Minister Irving McIntyre had presented it on August 4, putting recurrent revenue at EC$1,032.1 million (approximately US$382 million). Tax revenue accounts for EC$473.5 million of that, with non-tax revenue, the category that carries CBI receipts, at EC$558.6 million.
Which brings Nassief to the request that has run through all fourteen letters and gone nowhere. He has pressed for a foreign direct investment strategy unconnected to citizenship sales, calling the program vulnerable and the country dangerously dependent on it.
Seven years of letters have not produced one. “We do not have a non-CBI strategy, even at this stage, and that is very, very detrimental to the future of the island,” he said.
What He Is Asking For
In his most recent letter, Nassief requested a parliamentary hearing or special committee review, with participation from Cabinet, Parliament, the Financial Intelligence Unit, the CBIU, civil society, and selected private sector voices. Failing that, he wants judicial review, a commission of inquiry, and an independent forensic financial audit. He asked for a reply within 21 days.
Beyond pricing, he raises agreements he says should be public and are not, along with construction begun without approval. “Our law requires that before projects start, before construction begins, you have the approval of planning,” he said.
Those approvals protect the environment rather than the paperwork, in his framing. Developers, he said, “cannot just start to construct things,” and the state has to be told what is going up and where.
Nassief told reporters he does not believe the program is “transparent by any means,” and that reconciling how the money is spent is “very difficult.”
He is not asking for the program to close, which puts him at odds with Brussels and with his own government at the same time. “We would be willing to go to court,” he said.
IMI has put a series of questions to the Office of the Prime Minister covering the pricing allegations, the enforcement record, and Nassief’s request for a parliamentary hearing. We will publish Skerrit’s responses in full should he provide them.
