IMI has named Patrick Peters, CEO of ClientReferrals, the winner of the IMI Person of the Year Award for 2026. He received the award on November 3 at Palacio Paz in Buenos Aires, during the tenth edition of IMI Connect.
The IMI Person of the Year award goes to an investment migration practitioner who:
- broke new ground in the market;
- displayed remarkable achievements;
- materially advanced the industry’s interests; or
- otherwise made a notable and positive contribution to the community.
IMI Pro members nominate candidates, from which IMI’s editorial board, in consultation with our senior advisors and IMI Official Partner company heads, selects a winner. This year, one name came up more often than any other. When we looked at what Peters had built over the previous 12 months, the reason was plain.
Keys, Not Renderings
Peters wins the award for what ClientReferrals has built on the ground in St. Kitts & Nevis under the country’s Public Benefit Option (PBO). In June 2025, the government designated ClientReferrals an Approved Public Benefactor and launched the CR-NHC PBO, a partnership with the National Housing Corporation (NHC) to fund homes for low- and middle-income families.
The structure is deliberately simple. ClientReferrals raises the contributions from citizenship applicants and their advisors; the NHC, a statutory body created by Parliament in 1997, builds the homes on land it already owns; the Citizenship by Investment Unit (CIU) processes the applications. Because the NHC needs no minimum sum raised before breaking ground, construction began within four months of the designation.
Fifteen months later, on September 10, 2026, the NHC handed 19 families the keys to new homes at the Stapleton Housing Development in St. Peter’s: 16 two-bedroom houses and three one-bedroom ones, presented by Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Minister Geoffrey Hanley.
Ten more families received keys at the Harry Phipps Housing Development in Half Way Tree on October 2, in a handover ClientReferrals says was also funded through the option.
More than 100 homes are planned under the option in all. In May 2026, before the first keys had changed hands, the CIU named ClientReferrals Public Benefactor for a second project: the redevelopment of Basseterre High School, whose original building had deteriorated to the point of demolition. The plans call for modern classrooms, science and IT labs, workshops, and sports and arts facilities.
Why This Won
Peters did not invent the Public Benefit Option. What he did was take a qualifying category that could have become one more line on a fee schedule and turn it into a development model other programs can copy.
For years, Caribbean citizenship by investment (CBI) carried the weight of ghost developments: resorts that existed in brochures and on cleared plots of land, and nowhere else. Those projects handed critics their best material and left citizens of the host countries asking what, exactly, they were getting. A finished house with a family in it answers that question in a way no advocacy campaign can.
The timing matters too. Caribbean programs are moving toward genuine links, substantive contribution, and clearer benefits for host nations, and regulators in Brussels, Washington, and London have made plain that they will judge the programs on outcomes. Classrooms and house keys are outcomes that can be photographed, visited, and counted.
For that reason, the selection fits the award’s criteria unusually well. It answers the oldest criticism of CBI, that the money flows to intermediaries and developers rather than to ordinary citizens, with physical evidence to the contrary. And it does so in St. Kitts & Nevis, the oldest program in the market, running since 1984, and the one whose reputation still sets the tone for the region.
No Retail Clients, by Design
Peters’s route into investment migration ran through an audit desk. In August 2007 he was a 24-year-old senior auditor at KPMG in Canada, watching a close friend fly to Asia every month to work on Canadian Immigrant Investor Program files. He finished his CPA designation, handed in his resignation the next day, and has never looked back.
Guy Pilote, now Managing Director of ClientReferrals, has been his mentor from those first months. When the Caribbean programs began expanding in 2013, the firm made a choice that still defines it: it would never market to retail clients and never compete with the advisory firms that send it files.
ClientReferrals has run as a strictly business-to-business processor ever since, with teams in Antigua, Montreal, Cairo, and Shanghai. It has been a licensed agent and authorized representative for Antigua & Barbuda’s program since 2014.
That record goes some way to explaining the nominations. The firms that rely on ClientReferrals to get their files approved are run by the people who put his name forward, and they have had 12 years to judge whether he keeps his word.
What His Peers Say
Eric Major, Founder and CEO of Latitude Group, remembers the introduction. In the early days of the Antigua & Barbuda program, Guy Pilote, a friend of Major’s going back some 30 years, asked him to meet “our new guy,” a tall, young-looking accountant fresh out of school, and to consider routing Latitude’s Antigua files through him.
Major, then at Henley & Partners, already had relationships on the island he cared about and said he would think about it.
Peters did not push. “Every so often, once every six, eight, 12 months, he would just drop me a line, say hello, how are you doing,” Major recalls. Those brief exchanges, and the occasional conversation at a conference, added up: “I could see he was a smart guy, a knowledgeable guy. He was persistent; he was not being pushy, but asking for our business.”
Latitude eventually sent ClientReferrals a file or two. The firm “did such a great job servicing us” that it “won quite an important percentage of our overall business in Antigua, admittedly to the detriment of our other relationship. But he was that good, he was that worthy.”
What Major values most is temperament. Peters “has always got an optimistic view, a sensible view. He’s not the fear-mongering type,” and “brings a good level-headedness to the business.”
He expects Peters to be around “for a long, long time,” calls him worthy of the award “for his efforts in St. Kitts,” and notes two further qualifications: “that million-dollar smile,” and a Canadian passport, “which brings a special place in our hearts here at Latitude.”
For Mona Shah, Managing Partner of Mona Shah & Partners, the case rests on visibility. “What stood out to me this year is that Patrick’s work produced something you can see,” she says, pointing to the Stapleton handover, the more than 100 homes planned, and the school redevelopment now underway. “Investors and their advisors increasingly want to know exactly where their contribution goes, and Patrick can show them.”
Shah, who hosted Peters on her Global Investment Voice podcast, recalls him explaining plainly that PBO contributions go directly to the government and fund affordable housing for its people.
His “win-win-win” approach, benefiting applicants, their representatives, and the people of St. Kitts and Nevis, “is what this industry needs.” On a personal level, “Patrick is always so pleasant and very professional. At a time when it is difficult to find reputable people working in this space, he stands out.”
Werner Gruner of Get Golden Visa first met Peters over breakfast at IMI Connect Malta in 2023 and claims some credit for what followed: “I must admit his sense of humour has improved considerably since then, clearly the result of spending time with me.”
More seriously, “in a world where integrity and keeping your word can no longer be taken for granted, Patrick stands out. Honest, charismatic, and with a great sense of humour, he is also deeply committed to making a positive difference to the lives of people in CBI countries.”
Daisy Joseph-Andall of Joseph Rowe Law, who works the St. Kitts & Nevis program from the inside, puts it in terms of who benefits. Peters is “genuine, kind, and passionate about the social impact of his work in St. Kitts and Nevis,” and she is delighted to see him recognized. “His recognition shines a light on the people and communities positively impacted by Caribbean investment migration, and that makes me proud.”
Peters received the award on the second night of IMI Connect Buenos Aires, at a dinner for 125 guests under the stained-glass dome of Palacio Paz. He is the third recipient, after Veronica Cotdemiey in 2024 and Jeffrey Henseler in 2025.
