ST. GEORGE’S, Grenada, Dec 4, CMC – The chairman of the board of the Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP), Kaisha Ince, has dismissed a report by the self-styled United States-based financial analyst which he said is designed to discredit “a number of successful CIB programmes in the region” including Grenada.
“As Chairman of the Board of the Citizenship by Investment programme and as one of the persons referred to in (Kenneth) Rijock’s fabricated text message exchanges, I roundly reject the latest blogpost, which has unsubstantiated issues being put out as facts,” Ince said in a statement here.
She said Rijock’s latest blog, like several of the previous, “is bogus and an outright lie, intended to mislead and deceive people, and to disrupt Grenada’s CBI Programme”.
Earlier this year, the Dominica government filed a lawsuit against Rijock after he failed to retract, apologize and pay compensation for the allegations that he made regarding the Dominica CIP.
In her statement, Ince said that there is “absolutely no truth to the allegations made or indeed to the text messages he refers to in the blog post.
“In fact, the text messages he presents are ludicrous to say the least. Similar to the “Wells Fargo Bank screenshot” relied on to purportedly substantiate the fake news story published by Rijock on 21 August, 2017, the text messages that appear in this most recent blog post are a total fabrication.”
Ince warned that Rijock should “cease and desist from continuing to disseminate this fake news pieces, which are clearly malicious falsehoods, as the Government will have no hesitation whatsoever in prosecuting them to the full force of law”.
Last month, Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell said the government expects to rake in more than EC$81 million (One EC dollar=US$0.37 cents) in 2018 from the controversial CIP.
Grenada is one of several Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments that has implemented the CIP through which foreign investors are provided with citizenship in return for making a substantial investment in the socio-economic development of the country.
Delivering the EC$1.1 billion national budget to Parliament on Monday, Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell said that his administration has “adopted conservative assumptions for receipts from the CBI Programme, to the tune of $81.1 million”.
He told legislators that the CIP, which commenced in 2014, has exceeded all expectations in 2017 and is now regarded as one of the highest-rated programmes in the world.
