October 4, 2017 Citizens and residents of our beloved country, St. Kitts and Nevis, I address you today to encourage you to utterly ignore the vociferous distractions that our failing Prime Minister Dr. Timothy Harris is deliberately and deceptively creating to lure you away from focusing on the failing policies of the government of incompetence that he leads. Within the last 24 hours I brought to your attention that Dr. Timothy Harris continues to lead a government of actors who are concerned only about their own personal and financial interest, and that of their families and bosom friends. The Citizenship by Investment Policy (CIP) policy recently promulgated by his government is just another is part of a web of corruption and deception in which his government continuously operates. In my recent address, I posed a number of serious and pertinent questions to the Prime Minister about the Citizenship programme, and instead of responding to those questions that focus on the good people’s business, he used your taxpayers’ dollars to hold a press conference to spew untruths about the Leader of the Opposition.
Fellow citizens and residents, let me be absolutely clear: I have served you as Prime Minister for nearly 20 years and served in our Parliament since 1989. I have never held and will never ever hold the citizenship of any other country except the one in which I was born and the one to which I have committed my life for service. Prime Minister Harris is a vindictive and treacherous coward who has little respect for the office that he holds and for the people in whose trust he serves. His mission is to enrich himself as quickly as possible then leave for Canada, a country in which he has acquired permanent residency. Dr. Harris believes that his attempt to spite the Leader of the Opposition by disrespecting him, failing to release funding for his Office as required by law and refusing him the use of a diplomatic passport are reasonable courses of action in a modern St. Kitts and Nevis. When I was in office, I afforded Dr. Sir Kennedy Simmonds and his wife diplomatic passports because it was the right thing to do despite our political differences. Can anyone change the course of history? Dr. Simmonds served our country as Prime Minister, and that fact cannot ever be changed.
Prime Minister Harris, like a jealous little boy, is irate that my colleague Caribbean leaders have reached out to accommodate me with diplomatic status as a former Prime Minister and Caribbean Leader. However, I, Dr. Denzil Llewellyn Douglas, will never ever accept the citizenship of any other country. Full stop!
This red herring of an issue that the Prime Minister has raised will not make the people of this country lose sight of the fact that he continues to fail the people of this country miserably while looking after himself and his family only. While he savages our Citizenship by Investment Programme, reducing the price by 50% to US$150,000 for four passports, destroying the Real Estate sector in the process and putting construction workers and retailers out of an opportunity to prosper, he and his members have established a business for the Financial Contribution option of the CIP. He has also placed these same family members to manage and oversee the two banks in our country that the Government controls and through which he will pass his millions. He does not care that all of our major development projects are now at a stand still, that unemployment is on a rapid rise and that the growth trajectory for our economy is now set on a steep downward path. He simply does not care. So long as he and his family continue to fatten themselves in office, he remains at ease in all of this decay, backwardness and corruption. His family has boasted that by the time Harris is out of government, they would all be multimillionaires at taxpayers’ expense.
Meanwhile, our Prime Minister seems to be unable to help himself as he lies to the citizens of this country. He fails to come clean every time. The truth is, he has reduced the price of our passports because he has destroyed the CIP, and in a last ditch effort to create a slush fund for himself and his family before the ultimate death of the programme, he has come to you as a beguiling serpent. And to make matters worse, this watered-down CIP initiative has not been ratified by Parliament and it raises legitimate questions as to the validity of the citizenship and the passport that will be derived from it.
Again, I call upon Prime Minister Harris to stop his destruction of our CIP and the Real Estate sector. I call upon him to take stock and have the Parliament approve and ratify any CIP initiative. I call upon him to place all revenue receipts from the SIDF and similar programmes into the Consolidated Fund as he promised in his election campaign, and not in an unregulated agency run out of the Office of the Prime Minister.
Thank you my fellow citizens. Stay focused and may God bless us all!
Rt. Hon. Dr. Denzil L Douglas
Leader of the Opposition