“Part of the problem that the CIP has had is the movement of funds into the jurisdiction because of correspondent banking issues,” announced Cabinet spokesman, Minister Melford Nicholas at this week’s post-Cabinet meeting.
Despite this, the Cabinet has reported that the Citizenship by Investment Program (CIP) has performed well in 2019, raising $120 million dollars by October 2019. The Cabinet has a further projected year-end total of CIP receipts to be $132 million.
This total would represent a 32% increase from receipts garnered in 2018 ($100 million).
In 2017, the government collected $67 million in CIP revenues.
Nicholas explained that, “last year, we had to agree with the other CIP jurisdictions to lower some of the rates of trade and as a result of that, even though were processing a similar amount of files similar to the previous year, the yield has been less.”
The cost for Antigua and Barbuda’s citizenship under the National Development Fund (NDF) was reduced to US $100,000 (with processing fees of US 25,000 for up to a family of four and a due diligence fee of US $7,500) in 2017. In 2016, the price had been US $200,000.
“If we’re able to get a throttle on the correspondent banking issue and the funds are flowing, I think that it will serve us much better than it has within the last two years,” the minister explained.