St Kitts and Nevis to wind down citizenship by investment programme under EU pressure

Nothing changes for citizens, he says

His first message was to people who already hold a St Kitts and Nevis passport. "Nothing changes tonight for any person who lawfully holds our citizenship," he said, and he spoke directly to citizens at home and abroad: "Nothing changes for your travel. This decision is what protects it."

The pressure behind the decision is European. Drew pointed to a revised EU visa suspension law, in force since December 2025, that lists investor-citizenship schemes as a possible ground for suspending visa-free travel to the Schengen area. He said the European Commission wrote to his government in June inviting it to wind the programme down over a transition period, so that visa-free access could be preserved.

Antigua and Barbuda's prime minister's office has said that a letter from Commissioner Magnus Brunner, dated 25 June, went to five Eastern Caribbean governments and asks them to phase their programmes out by 1 June 2028. The EU has not published the letter, and Drew gave no end date in his Friday address to the nation.

No date yet, and no fire sale

Applications will continue until a final closing date is agreed with the EU and announced. Until then, Drew said, the programme will run "on the strictest standards in its history", with "no rush, no discounts and no fire sale". The staff of the Citizenship Unit, he said, will be redeployed to lead a new push for conventional foreign direct investment.

Leaning less on CBI

Drew argued that the island has been getting ready for this. In 2022, he said, citizenship by investment made up as much as 70 per cent of government revenue. In 2026 it is less than 20 per cent. "That did not happen by accident. It happened because we planned it," he said, adding that the government has been preparing "for this day since 2022".

The replacement plan is built around energy. Drew said work continues on drilling six geothermal wells in Nevis and building a power plant, with a power link to St Kitts. A 50 megawatt solar plant, whose corporate partner will be chosen "in a mere few weeks", would make the federation a net energy supplier, he said, with neighbours including Antigua and Barbuda already interested in buying power. He said he had met a European Commission delegation a day earlier to discuss support through the EU's Global Gateway programme, and that talks are under way with Taiwan, the United States, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Italy, the Caribbean Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Green Climate Fund.

It is a sharp change of tone from October 2024, when Drew said the programme "has been saved" after the reforms made under his government, according to Times Caribbean's reporting at the time.

The rest of the region

St Kitts and Nevis is one of five Eastern Caribbean states named in the Commission's visa suspension report of December 2025, alongside Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada and Saint Lucia. Their leaders met in Roseau on 10 July and said they would engage with the EU. Whether the others follow St Kitts and Nevis will be the question to watch.

Drew has separately said that the prospect of financial blacklisting concerns him more than the risk to visa-free travel, a warning he made at a press roundtable on 5 November.