BASSETERRE, St. Kitts - THE St. Kitts-Nevis Labour Party (SKNLP) Administration is fulfillinging its promise to provide dividends from proceeds of the Citizenship By Investment (CBI) to citizens and residents.
This comes as Cabinet recently approved the payment of the dividends, but no further details of the payout in terms of how much each person or household will receive.
In a media statement from the Press Secretary’s Office, it was explained that the “CBI dividend is a share of the profits and retained earnings received from the Citizenship by Investment Programme”.
“The CBI dividend will be facilitated through the Saint Christopher and Nevis Social Security and will be distributed in two tiers or categories. The first category is the pensionable and pensioners and the second category is classified as those who are not yet pensionable,” the statement read.
During the SKNLP’s campaign in the lead up to the August 5 General Elections, then candidate Dr. Terrance Drew chastised former Prime Minister Dr. Timothy Harris over his handling of the CBI programme.
“The net profits from the CBI programme, we will pay it in dividend to our people who are the working people of St. Kitts and Nevis,” Dr. Drew told a crowd in Trafalgar before the General Elections.
There have long been debates over how the people of St. Kitts and Nevis could benefit from the programme, which has been used to primarily fund social programmes and add to the local budget.
But even as the initiative means well for the country, the International Monetary Fund had called for territories, especially those with high dependency on tourism, to curb spending their economic buffers at this time. Instead, the financial institution advised that those buffers be saved for difficult periods such as a pandemic.
That call came as the IMF believes an economic slowdown is imminent due to inflation and a possible recession in 2023.
That is expected to be compounded with the threat posed by a possible resurgence of COVID-19 in the Federation’s tourism source markets, such as the United States.
Currently, the US is being lashed with a triple disaster of respiratory ailments: the RSV, Flo and a major uptick in the number of positive COVID cases.
