Caribbean governments spent years rewriting their citizenship by investment (CBI) rules on the assumption that compliance would keep the programs alive. That assumption was wrong from the beginning, Premier of Nevis Mark Brantley said at his monthly press conference on July 23.
“We used to be able to go to these international agencies and big countries and argue a moral position, a position based on fairness,” he said. “Everybody is now concerned about self-interest.”
Reform was never the currency it appeared to be, in his telling. “What happened, in my opinion, is we misread the tea leaves,” he said. “All along we felt that if we only reformed and if we kept reforming and we kept giving them what they want, then the programs would survive.”
What had hardened inside the EU, in his account, was a philosophy under which “these programs are bad” whatever any government does about them. “And if something is bad, because philosophically they’re opposed to them, it matters very little what reforms you make.”
Malta is the evidence he says the region misread. “The EU took Malta to court to shut down Malta’s program and succeeded,” he said. “So if the EU do that to their own, what do you think they were going to do to Saint Kitts and Nevis, to Antigua and Barbuda, to Grenada?”
His shorthand compresses a longer sequence. The European Commission brought infringement proceedings, and the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on April 29, 2025, in Case C-181/23, that Malta’s investor naturalization route breached EU law by treating citizenship as a transaction. Malta repealed the route that July and replaced it with a discretionary merit-based framework.
Vanuatu supplies the other precedent. It lost its Schengen waiver permanently in November 2024, the first time the EU had removed a third country from the visa-free list, and the European Parliament approved an expanded mechanism in October 2025 that makes operating a CBI program a ground for suspension in its own right.
His conclusion from that sequence is that pleading compliance now buys nothing. “So we now have the situation and going to them and telling them, well, Lord, we did everything you asked us to do. Spare us. That’s not going to work. They are hell-bent on closing down these programs.”
Planning for 2028 starts now
The Commission wrote to all five Eastern Caribbean CBI states on June 25, asking them to phase out their programs by June 1, 2028 and offering a 24-month transition. Brantley reads the deadline as a countdown rather than an opening bid.
“I believe that they’ve given us a two-year window,” he said. “What we now need to do is to say, what do we do after those two years? What do we do after June of 2028? And start the planning now. Geothermal, geothermal, geothermal.”
Agriculture came next on his list, then infrastructure and private capital. He named the Nevis airport project, on which ground has been broken, and “other major investments like the Destiny Project and others, which we are hopeful can come and stream to generate employment, generate activity in the country, grow the GDP of the country.”
Reform has not stopped for his verdict. Saint Kitts and Nevis is midway through its own genuine-link overhaul, phasing out passive contributions in favor of physical presence and economic participation, and Antigua and Barbuda tabled a bill this month raising post-citizenship residency from five days to 30 and putting its unit under independent audit.
Meanwhile Saint Vincent and the Grenadines still plans to launch a program of its own this year. Three governments are tightening or building while Brantley tells them the exercise is futile.
The project he is counting on is stuck
Destiny appeared on the diversification list on the same morning Brantley confirmed it remains unapproved. Prime Minister Terrance Drew had written to him, Brantley said, setting out four issues of concern following cabinet consideration, and representatives of the federal government, the Nevis Island Administration, and the developers spent much of July 22 at the Four Seasons trying to resolve them.
Under the federation’s Special Sustainability Zone framework, Destiny is the first application, and its investment migration dimension carries the largest fiscal consequences. Both governments have looked at a projected influx of 7,000 to 10,000 property buyers as a cohort to route through the CBI program, and lawmakers shaped the SSZ legislation at least partly around that logic.
Which makes the post-CBI framing awkward. Developer Olivier Janssens is funding construction and the first two years of operation of a US$1.3 million dialysis center at Alexandra Hospital, announced at the same press conference, alongside the US$100 monthly payment to every Nevisian he has promised once the federal government approves the development agreement. One alternative to CBI dependence, in other words, is a project whose economics were built around CBI and whose approval sits with the federal cabinet.
“No one who’s coming to save us”
Brantley made the fiscal case in more detail in an op-ed published July 7, titled “The Death of Citizenship by Investment in the OECS,” drawing on an address he gave in Grenada on March 22. By his own count, CBI has accounted for 30 to 35% of annual government revenues in Grenada in recent years, 15 to 25% in Saint Lucia, 40 to 60% in Dominica, and as much as 60 to 70% in Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Wide ranges, self-sourced, but the direction is not in dispute. His point in citing them is constitutional rather than fiscal: “If our national revenue and development is outsourced to policymakers in distant lands, then our claims of political independence are but mere imagination.”
He also offered a reading of why Brussels is unlikely to soften. Members of the EU, he wrote, “are already seeking to allocate more of their budgets to preparing for war in the name of preserving peace,” and the bloc, like the US, is “becoming increasingly insular, seeking to do less abroad and more at home.” Brussels will demand closure, he expects, “without offering any alternatives to us.”
Brantley put the same argument in blunter terms. “We have kept kicking the can down the road and thinking that somehow the outer world is going to understand,” he said. “The outer world, I am persuaded, doesn’t give two hoots about these small countries.”
What follows from that, in his account, is a change of posture rather than of policy. “There’s no one who’s coming to save us. The Caribbean has to save itself,” Brantley said, arguing the region “must treat with the world not as we would wish it to be, but we must treat with the world as it is.”
Accept the deadline, or sell around it
Nuri Katz, Founder and CEO of Apex Capital Partners, would take the deadline rather than contest it. Caribbean leaders “should accept the deadline given by the European Union,” he said, and spend the interval on two things.
Diversification is the first, and the second is a negotiation nobody has yet tabled. Governments should “start negotiating with the European Union as to a package of support for the fact that they are accepting the request by the European Union to give up much needed income,” Katz said. “And there should be an exchange for that.”
Gaston Browne has made a version of that argument, and Brantley endorsed it in his op-ed. What Katz adds is the sequencing: acceptance first, as the thing being traded.
On the diversification half, he credits Brantley with having already started. The Premier “has put his, so to say, money where his mouth is,” Katz said, citing geothermal and the Nevis Online Gaming Authority, which licenses online casinos under an ordinance that took effect in May 2025.
Other governments in the region should be “searching for innovative ways to raise capital and look at what is beyond citizenship by investment,” he said. There is “no question,” on his reading, that the Caribbean will have to diversify out of CBI.
Rafael Cintron, CEO of Wealthy Expat, would go the other way. He said the strategy “should be stop fighting with the EU, it isn’t reliable anyway long term,” and that programs should instead “focus on new markets, expand the program.”
The three positions share a premise and part company on everything after it. None expects Brussels to be argued out of the phase-out. Brantley plans for after, Katz would trade acceptance for a support package, and Cintron would keep selling into markets that never wanted Schengen access.
Drew is working a different track, having joined the other four heads of government in Roseau on July 10. Their joint statement agreed to send a high-level mission to Brussels, its firmest language concerning the terms of any transition rather than any refusal of one. The Premier, who is also Leader of the Opposition in the federal National Assembly, is telling the region that the mission will not change the outcome.
September brings the nearer test, when the interim vetting measures set out in the June 25 letters are due to be in place.
