"He Shot to Death the Reputation of Antigua and Barbuda": Senator Jonathan Wehner uses PM Browne's Words from Hansard as Evidence

Opposition Senator Jonathan Wehner has accused Prime Minister Gaston Browne of "assassinating" the integrity of the Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP) and the reputation of Antigua and Barbuda — and of doing so on the floor of Parliament, with legislation the Prime Minister personally piloted, after warning the nation of the very consequences the country now faces.

Appearing on Tuesday's edition (September 15) of Connecting with Dave Lester Payne on Observer Radio 91.1 FM, guest-hosted by Algernon "Serpent" Watts, the United Progressive Party (UPP) senator zeroed in on a single date: March 30, 2016 — the day the Browne administration passed the Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment (Amendment) Act, No. 2 of 2016.

Borrowing from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Senator Wehner branded it "a day which will live in infamy."

"A certain member for St. John's City West went to Parliament that day. He took with him a weapon. He loaded it with bullets… and he went on the floor of Parliament and shot to death the reputation of Antigua and Barbuda — doing so with his words and with the bill that he brought that day and passed," the senator declared. "The reputation of our country was assassinated on that day."

The "weapon," he said, was the Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment (Amendment) Act of 2016: "This is the gun that killed the integrity of the CBI programme, killed the reputation of Antigua and Barbuda." The "bullets," he argued, were some of its individual provisions.

PM Browne's Own Warning, Read back from Hansard

Before dissecting the amendments, Senator Wehner read from the Hansard — the verbatim parliamentary record — of that same March 30, 2016, sitting to establish what the Member for St. John's City West, Gaston Browne, told the nation in his own words.

On the programme's importance, the senator quoted the Prime Minister as saying, "the CIP programme has been literally a lifesaver for this country. If it was not for the CIP programme, many of the debts that are now up to date and are being serviced would not have been brought up to date… In fact, many of the initiatives that we would have undertaken would not have been doable without this initiative."

Senator Wehner set the context of the financial stakes and potential reputational damage to the nation resulting from the mismanagement of the CIP by further quoting PM Browne: "When it comes to the CIP programme, we have to maintain the integrity of that programme. If we fail to do so, it has revenue implications for the country. It has implications for the reputation of the country, and it even has other consequences."

Then came what Senator Wehner described as the most ironic passage — the Prime Minister spelling out those "other consequences" himself: "If our international partners are of the view that this programme is being abused, you can be assured that your visa-free access will be revoked" — including, PM Browne specified, "your visa-free access to Canada, to Schengen." The Hansard records the Prime Minister adding: "Mr. Speaker, we had to do the correct thing and to lay everything bare on the table. Up to today, my government is the only government, perhaps in the world, that has a CIP programme that continues to lay all of the information on the table."

A decade later, the European Commission has formally demanded the phase-out of the CBI programme by June 1, 2028, with a suspension of Schengen visa-free access threatened as early as the end of this year under the EU's Visa Suspension Mechanism — an outcome Senator Wehner said PM Browne foretold and then brought about. "I can't say it's prophetic, because if you're the one fulfilling your own prophecy, it's not prophetic," he said. "The Member for City West, ten years ago, on March 30, 2016, told us what was going to happen — and we're seeing it happen today."

The First "Bullet": Repealing the Audit Requirement

"The first of such bullets was Section 3 of the Act, loaded into the chamber by the Member for St. John's City West on the floor of Parliament," Senator Wehner said. That section repealed Sections 2A to 2K of the principal 2013 CBI Act passed under the Baldwin Spencer administration — including Section 2J, the accounts and audit provision requiring the Citizenship by Investment Unit's (CIU) accounts to be audited by the Director of Audit or an auditor approved by the Director of Audit.

"No longer within the Citizenship by Investment Act was there any requirement for the Director of Audit, or an auditor approved by the Director of Audit, to audit the accounts of the CIU," he explained, before turning his fire directly on the Prime Minister: "How is it that financial oversight, accountability, and transparency can be gone, and you are claiming to be someone who maintains the integrity of the programme? You're an assassinator, man. You're a murderer — a murderer of the integrity and reputation of our CBI programme and of our country."

He drew a sharp contrast between PM Browne and the former Prime Minister Dr. Winston Baldwin Spencer who created the programme: "You know the difference in class and style and statesmanship between Gaston Browne and Baldwin Spencer. It's chalk to cheese."

The senator's charge builds on his July contribution in the Senate, where he revealed written confirmation from the Director of Audit that the CIU's accounts have not been audited by that office, or any auditor approved by it, since 2016 — and on Prime Minister Browne admitting "I don't know" when Barbuda MP Trevor Walker asked in an August parliamentary sitting when the CIU was last audited.

EC$120 Million in Jeopardy

Quantifying what is at risk, Senator Wehner cited page 10 of the 2026 Budget Estimates, where CBI receipts — budget code 11147 — are projected to deliver EC$120 million into the Consolidated Fund. He also cited Director of Audit reports showing inflows from the National Development Fund (NDF) alone — just one of the programme's four investment categories — of EC$62 million in 2021, EC$65 million in 2020, EC$59 million in 2018, EC$55 million in 2017 and EC$120 million in 2016.

"You, assassinator, Member for City West — by putting the integrity and reputation of Antigua and Barbuda in a pool of blood on the floor of Parliament, you have put that $120 million in jeopardy," he charged.

The Second "Bullet": The Minister Hand-Picks the Charities

Another provision Senator Wehner singled out was Section 8 of the 2016 CBI (Amendment) Act, which provides that the Minister "may from time to time approve one or more non-profit organisations to receive allocations of charitable investments from the National Development Fund."

"The Minister, according to this act — this gun — is allowed to decide which charities receive that money," he said. Under the original 2013 Act, he noted, that power sat elsewhere: "It wasn't the minister; it was the ABIA, the Antigua and Barbuda Investment Authority, in collaboration with the board of the CIU, who determined which charities get money from the NDF. You see the difference in leadership style… as it relates to transparency, accountability, in maintaining the integrity and reputation." PM Baldwin Spencer, he argued, deliberately kept the decision out of his own hands. Senator Wehner dramatised the former Prime Minister's reasoning this way: "No, no, man — I can't be the one who's determining what charities, such as perhaps, Share Inc. — perhaps just calling names — would receive money. That would be nastiness… so I can't do that." PM Spencer, he said, instead "put that authority into the hands of the Investment Authority, the ABIA, and the board of the CIU — but not this man, not this prime suspect."

The Third "Bullet": Names Erased and a Law Flagrantly Violated

Senator Wehner then turned to Regulation 13, governing the CIU's statutory six-month reports, which must be submitted to the Minister within 14 days of the end of each half-year and laid before Parliament by the minister within 30 days of the minister's receipt. The regulation requires each report to disclose:

(a) the number of applications made, granted and refused;

(b) the number of passports issued;

(c) the dates of applications and the minister's decisions;

(d) applicants' nationalities;

(e) the amounts paid;

and — under Regulation 13(2)(f) — "the name of the approved project, charitable organisation, government-sponsored project or business investment in respect of which payment was made to support each application."

The 2016 changes, he said, quietly diluted sub-regulation 2(d): "The original act did not say, 'the nationality.' It said the names, addresses, and nationalities. That is what the Baldwin Spencer administration put." This means the public can no longer know who is acquiring the nation's citizenship, only where they come from.

As for the disclosure of who receives CBI money, the requirement survived on paper but not in practice. "The laws he didn't change, he just refused to follow," the senator said. "There have been twenty six-month reports from the CIU. Only one of the twenty has ever followed Regulation 13(2)(f) by publishing the name of the project, the charity, the government-sponsored project, or business that has received money from the CIP programme." In his July senate contribution, Senator Wehner identified a single early exception — the 2015 report, which listed approved projects and the sums they received — with every subsequent report omitting the legally required disclosure. The reports, he told listeners, are publicly available at cip.gov.ag.

When host Algernon Watts asked whether the CIU could therefore be taken to court for breaching the law, the senator's answer was immediate: "Of course."

Alex Saab Guilty Plea Lands Mid-Broadcast

The reputational stakes were underscored in real time when Watts read breaking reports on air that Alex Saab Morán — the Colombian-born businessman granted an Antigua and Barbuda diplomatic passport and appointed the country's special economic envoy to Venezuela — had pleaded guilty in a Miami federal court to money laundering, agreeing to cooperate with ongoing US investigations and forfeit approximately US$195 million in illicit proceeds.

Senator Wehner reminded listeners that official money laundering investigations against Saab dated back to 2012 — years before the diplomatic appointment — and that former cabinet spokesman Ambassador Lionel "Max" Hurst once boasted that the nation's CIP due diligence was among the best in the world. "If they don't believe us, just take out your phone and Google Alex Saab," he said. "You will see everything there."

"A Leader We Elected Four Times in a Row"

Senator Wehner closed the segment by returning to the question of accountability at the very top. "How can our country not have suffered reputational damage," he asked, "when we have a leader that we elected four times in a row, who has deliberately gone out and removed financial accountability from our CBI programme?" His comments extend the argument he made in the Upper House in July, when he declared that a decade of unaudited CBI accounts, ongoing breaches of Regulation 13(2)(f) and repeated due diligence failures made the administration not victims of international pressure but "co-conspirators in the assassination of the reputation of Antigua and Barbuda."

Prime Minister Browne has vowed that the programme will continue "with or without" European visa-free arrangements, calling it too important a source of non-tax revenue to surrender — even as Brussels' December Visa Suspension Mechanism report looms as the next milestone that could turn the threatened loss of visa-free Schengen access into reality.