Special Correspondent
Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from various individuals around the world, while the majority of his clients are from India and the United Arab Emirates. Skerrit, with the active collaboration of an individual named Paul Singh and his team at CS Global Partners, 10 Dover Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 4LQ, Phone +44-(0)-207-318-4343 have been running the passport selling scam, while CS Global is handling the money laundering of those clients of Dominica’s citizenship project. According to information, CS Global Partners has its offices in London, Dubai, Beijing, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Singapore, St Kitts and Nevis.
On the website of CS Global Partners, it says: “CS Global Partners is a global marketing agency specialized in FDI through marketing and PR efforts. The company was established in London, in 2012, by Micha-Rose Emmett, a South African dual-qualified lawyer. Micha has worked with governments and private firms in the UK, the United Arab Emirates and multiple nations in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and continental Europe. Headquartered in the heart of London, with offices across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, CS Global Partners comprises a passionate team of reputable specialists and lawyers, split into two distinct directions: marketing the programs, products and services that governments, universities and brands entrust us with; and providing expert advice to investors looking for citizenship or residency solutions”.
Members of CS Global Partners are: Micha Emmett, Paul Singh, Erion Andoni, Beatrice Gatti, and Brijesh Bharatiya. It is well anticipated that Paul Singh and Brijesh Bharatiya are handling the cases of Indian nationals as well as helping them in smuggling of black money from India to Dominica, via United Arab Emirates and London.
According to counter-money laundering experts, CS Global Partners are mainly responsible for handling the transfer of millions of dollars on behalf of Dominica’s government and help the potential buyers of citizenship against certain amount of fees. This company is meeting prospective Indian buyers of Dominica’s citizenship at 29, Jor Bagh, New Delhi 110003, India. Phone +91 1143588691.
More about CS Global Partners:
In 2010, as elections neared in Saint Kitts and Nevis, a grainy hidden-camera video was uploaded to YouTube. In the anonymously produced clip, voters across the small Eastern Caribbean island nation saw prime minister candidate Lindsey Grant in a hotel room, listening as a British-accented property developer promises him a $1.5 million payment in exchange for a bargain price on a plot of government land.
“What we’re after is making sure you get into power,” says the developer, whose face and voice are obscured. In return, “you will help us. . . how does that sound?”
Grant, a Harvard Law School-educated lawyer running on an anti-corruption platform, appears reluctant, but eventually pushes the bribe higher, to $1.7 million. The video cuts to white text on black: “He sold his country and the people’s land just to win power.”
The video went viral in Saint Kitts, and the incumbent prime minister, Denzil Douglas, was soon re-elected for a fourth term. Douglas denied any knowledge of the sting operation, but across the Caribbean, speculation swirled that it was the work of a clandestine London-based political consultancy named SCL Group.
The now-defunct Anglo-American firm has gained notoriety for its harvesting of Facebook profiles and shady campaign tactics, but the storm of controversy has been building for decades. Before its younger sibling, Cambridge Analytica, worked for Donald Trump, SCL Group claimed to have built a portfolio of political work in three dozen countries, deploying its “behavioral change” tactics in sometimes shaky democracies.
In the Eastern Caribbean, where SCL quietly operated in at least six countries, some of its work had an indirect objective: Assisting a lucrative trade in passports. The sales are legal, and lucrative, with the world’s rich thought to spend over $2 billion on “citizenship by investment,” or CBI. But reporting and interviews with industry insiders show how a nexus of buyers, officials, citizenship agents, and consultants have helped enable criminals and ignited political wildfires that continue to rage even now.
In at least five Caribbean nations, the company’s campaigns were backed by Christian H. Kalin, the chief executive of Henley and Partners, a London-based firm that markets and sells second passports, and helped support politicians thought to be sympathetic to Henley’s interests. With a friendly politician in office, according to people familiar with the arrangement, Henley could then become that country’s primary passport merchant, giving it the right to earn lucrative commissions on every sale.
Funds from the passports are now a major source of revenue and investment for these countries, filling holes left by weakening exports and the impacts of hurricanes and climate change: By 2014, passports had become Saint Kitts’s biggest export, with the revenue thought to account for 25 percent of GDP.
But Saint Kitts and Dominica offer two of the world’s cheapest, largest, and oldest CBI programs. And, unlike some rich countries that require aspiring citizens to actually reside there, Dominica, which is just 290 square miles, and Saint Kitts, which is only 105 square miles, do not.
Many of the passport holders are from countries with unpopular passports who may otherwise have trouble obtaining travel visas—think Iran, China, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. The firms say their well-heeled clients are seeking protection against unpredictable situations at home amid an era of terrorism fears and economic instability.
But the investment programs have also proved popular with a Who’s Who of fugitives and fraudsters. Convicted felons Paul Bilzerian and Roger Ver gave up their US citizenship and now use Saint Kitts passports. Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the illicit marketplace Silk Road, now appealing a life sentence handed down by a US court, was attempting to obtain Dominica citizenship when he was arrested.
Overseas tax evasion is estimated to cost the US as much as $100 billion annually, but Washington’s concerns are larger than taxes. It was a series of “Iranian nationals” seeking to evade global sanctions whom the US Treasury cited in 2014 when it added Saint Kitts’s passports to a watch list, warning financial institutions of their role in “illicit financial activity.”
As data about the passports—it’s not publicly known how many are out there and who holds them—the precise role of firms like Henley and SCL has also remained mostly in the shadows, the subject of allegations of dirty tricks, kickbacks, and hidden commissions that have circulated across the Caribbean for years. Then in March, as allegations by former SCL employee Christopher Wylie and Channel 4’s reporting documented a litany of misdeeds by the company, details of the Kalin-SCL relationship first began to emerge in a report in The Spectator.
TO BE CONTINUED …
