The Labour Spokesman Editorial
Once again, our beloved country finds itself under very dark clouds of shame and embarrassment. Information from sources in Middle Eastern countries, amongst others, attests to the ongoing corruptions of persons holding office in our public sector. These ‘developments’ should not be surprising to any of us, because we have been warned, time and again, that persons in the entity which used to masquerade as ‘Team Unity’ were indulging in all kinds of self-enriching malpractices.
In our editorial of Friday 29 March 2019, captioned “The Worsening Stench Of Corruption,” we again tried to alert the people of St Kitts and Nevis to what was going on with regard to the Citizenship By Investment (CBI) programme. On that occasion we drew lessons from an open international meeting at a Mid-East venue, during which a panelist had been asked to address concerns about “tom-foolery going on in the Caribbean, especially in relation to real estate matters, switching of applications.” The panelist had responded that 2018 and 2019 were going to prove ‘troublesome’: “A lot of truth is going to come out, and it is not going to be nice. It’s probably going to implicate heads of government and heads of programmes, and it is going to implicate millions of dollars which are going to be lost. The people who are going to pay the price are the poor people of these islands.” How truly prophetic were those words!
The panelist went on to reveal that they had been informing the government of St Kitts about fraudulent practices for a very long time, but NO action had been taken. More than three hundred (300) applicants had been ‘directed’ to switch their applications to another programme — an action which deprived the country of considerable amounts of money. Recent disclosures concerning the behaviours of certain high-ranking politicians attest to the fact that the ‘Pandora’s Box’ has indeed been opened. A most telling case in point is the disclosure of information pertaining to attempts to raise over three billion dollars (EC) with which to construct a (supposedly) thirty-million-dollar (EC) prison. Question: Who is pocketing the extra two billion seven hundred thousand dollars? That is most certainly a huge scandal, indeed the biggest ever!