{"id":18321,"date":"2024-11-22T17:54:21","date_gmt":"2024-11-22T17:54:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/?p=18321"},"modified":"2024-11-22T17:54:21","modified_gmt":"2024-11-22T17:54:21","slug":"nevis-premier-mark-brantley-calls-on-prime-minister-drew-to-reveal-cbi-figures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/?p=18321","title":{"rendered":"Nevis Premier Mark Brantley calls on Prime Minister Drew to reveal CBI figures"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

by Eulana Weekes<\/p>\n

St. Kitts and Nevis (WINN): Nevis\u2019 Premier, Mark Brantley, accused successive Prime Ministers of failing to reveal the number of passports issued under the St. Kitts and Nevis Citizenship By Investment (CBI) programme and the money obtained as a result.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo Prime Minister has ever come to the people and said, listen, X number of passports were processed, X amount of money was made, this is what we paid out to agents and whoever, this is what the country will take. We\u2019ve never had that accounted. So, you\u2019re hearing now, people like Martinez were saying, oh, this information is out there, based on our calculation, people should be getting 15,000 U.S. dollars and all of that. Whether that is factual or not, or whether that is just somebody extrapolating and building a model and saying, based on that, this is the position, I can\u2019t really say. So, I myself, I\u2019m waiting, and I will tell you, I was in the government for seven years, and we got no information on the Citizenship by Investment Program. Every time you ask in Cabinet what the position was, the Prime Minister then, gave an excuse. Oh, he has to bring the people from finance to explain, he [going to] bring the people from CIP, and then the following week came by and somebody travelled and you\u2019d never got information. His predecessor, Dr Douglas, I remember one time in what I could only consider a farcical session in Parliament, where I believe it was Eugene Hamilton, who was on the opposition benches then, asked about the number of passports that had been issued or something, and I think the response was, not a lot, or something like that. I have searched the world, but I can\u2019t find a number, which is not a lot. Numbers that tend to be one, two, three, four, but the response was not a lot, or not many, or something like that, and, you know, it\u2019s been the response.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

At his November 21 press conference, Premier Brantley said the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of St. Kitts and Nevis need to reveal the Citizenship By Investment figures. He argued that the move would help to bring some clarity to the public and stave off any misrepresentation about the programme.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need a proper account, you know, we need the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance to come out and say, these are the numbers because he\u2019s the Minister of Finance, he\u2019s also the Prime Minister, and he\u2019s also the Minister of National Security. So, all the ministries that would be relevant to that fall under the one office. So, that information, I think, should be made public so that individuals like yourself and me, we don\u2019t have to question we know what the data is, and when we have accurate information, it would mean then that others who might be bent on misrepresentation, aren\u2019t allowed to get away with it, because we have accurate information.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In a November 18 podcast, Philippe Martinez shared his company, MSR MEDIA\u2019s, position in a corruption scandal involving the Citizenship By Investment programme. He had moved to the courts to untangle the complexities and hold notable persons accountable for what he suggests are deceptive schemes under the Citizenship by Investment Programme.<\/p>\n

In a matter that has garnered enormous public attention, people continue to question how Martinez, a convicted fraudster from France, could become a CBI client, while some politicians blame each other for dropping the ball in the due diligence process.<\/p>\n

Brantley, Premier of Nevis, expressed that his administration\u2019s arrangement with Martinez was to develop a movie industry in Nevis, thus claiming that former Prime Minister Dr Timothy Harris should have ensured that due diligence was done regarding the CBI arrangements.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did not hire MSR to be my banker. I did not bring MSR in to do anything other than what I\u2019ve said to make some movies. So, the background checks that I would have been interested in on MSR are their experience and qualifications to do movies. Mr Martinez has been associated, prior to him coming here, with over 50 film projects. I know that after Mr. Martinez got into his kerfuffle in St. Kitts, that those who wanted, I suppose, to attack him said that he had been convicted of some crime. He has indicated that that happened when he was 20 years old and that he has since, of course, done, changed his life, turned his life around. He\u2019s now making movies and has been doing that for the rest of his days. Mr. Martinez now, I think, is a man of 56 or 57, something like that\u2026 The first time I heard it came from the former Prime Minister, Dr Harris, and he said that I brought a bad man here and we didn\u2019t do any due diligence on the man, and all of that, but if I bring a bad woman here and I didn\u2019t do any due diligence on her, it\u2019s my woman, it have nothing to do with you. You jump in, you take him from me, and then you start with him. Well, when you took him over, you should have done your due diligence. That\u2019s what should have happened. You didn\u2019t do that. In fact, you tried to do it in a clandestine way. Go behind my back. When I grew up in Brown Hill, they used to say you \u2018backraised\u2019. So, you \u2018backraised\u2019 me. Go behind my back. Well, when you were doing all that, why didn\u2019t you do your due diligence and determine whether or not you wanted to do business?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Brantley expressed, \u201c I was doing business with Mr. Martinez to make movies, for which he\u2019s eminently qualified, and which he delivered on because we did nine movies here on the island of Nevis. We had eight on Nevis, and I think the ninth was done mostly on St. Kitts. That\u2019s what I hired him to do. This whole thing about background checks is a red herring because MSR would have been approved under the CBI program, not by me, not by Nevis. So, the question about background checks should more appropriately be extended to the federal government, because they were who approved him, and more specifically, to Dr. Harris at the time, because he was who approved him.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Dr Terrance Drew, as the leader of St. Kitts and Nevis and Minister of Finance, said Martinez was accepted into the CBI programme before his administration was sworn into office. Due to a lack of due diligence, St. Kitts and Nevis is left to fight for its patrimony.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we met Mr. Martinez, when we got into office, he was already part of the CBI program. Mr. Martinez, with MSR, was admitted to the program in May of 2022.<\/em>
You\u2019ll be fully aware that I was not the prime minister at that particular time. It was another prime minister who admitted Mr Martinez into our CBI program. We thought there\u2019s a process that anybody who is admitted into the CBI program has to go through a due diligence process. I would have thought, as everybody would have thought, that Mr. Martinez, the MSR gentleman, would have gone through that process as well, and so, he was part of the program, and I related to everybody who was part of the program. <\/em>
However, we have a process where we would also do other types of due diligence, and so, when we do our other due diligence, we discovered a checkered pass for the MSR gentleman. A checkered past that showed from our information that he was convicted of fraud. Initially, Martinez was invited to Nevis, where he partnered over there in the movie industry.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Prime Minister further stated, \u201cSo, he was initially invited to Nevis from our report, and I don\u2019t know the Nevis process. However, he then came over to St. Kitts in 2022 to be a part of the CBI program, and on various levels, when you meet investors, when you make that final deal, you would have a due diligence reporter process that would determine whether the deal goes through or not, because I see investors all the time. I always say to investors, before we sign off on anything with the country, one of the things that must be done is due diligence on who the investor is, and based on the report of that due diligence, it determines whether something is done or not. In this case, with due diligence like this, you would have said no because anybody convicted of fraud and served jail time for fraud that\u2019s not the type of person you want in your jurisdiction, unfortunately, because it can lead to unsavoury things like what we are experiencing now- a gentleman who wants to throw the whole country under the bus. I have to stand up for this country. You can\u2019t extort all this money from the treasury. I would have to come to the people and say, this is what is being put. How can you hide that? 10% of your budget at the lower end, and 25% of your budget on the higher end. You can\u2019t get away with that.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Source: <\/em> politics.einnews.com\u2026<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Eulana Weekes St. Kitts and Nevis (WINN): Nevis\u2019 Premier, Mark Brantley, accused successive Prime Ministers of failing to reveal the number of passports issued under the St. Kitts and Nevis Citizenship By Investment (CBI) programme and the money obtained as a result. \u201cNo Prime Minister has ever come to the people and said, listen, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}