Roseau, Dominica – For seven years, hotelier Gregor Nassief says he tried to raise concerns about Dominica’s Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programme behind closed doors.

He says he wrote letters. He met with the Prime Minister, ministers, the Attorney General and the President. And he repeatedly warned about what he describes as the “serial violation” of laws governing the programme.

Now, a leaked letter has forced Nassief to take the dispute public.

The hotelier behind Secret Bay, a CBI-funded luxury resort project, is calling for Dominica’s citizenship programme to be halted in its current form, subjected to an independent forensic audit covering the past decade, and investigated by a Commission of Inquiry.

Nassief says he plans to petition the President of the Commonwealth of Dominica for an independent inquiry, accusing Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit of ignoring his repeated requests to review the programme.

His latest intervention came last Friday, when Nassief held a press conference following the leak of a letter he sent in June to Prime Minister Skerrit and Opposition Leader Jesma Paul-Victor.

Nassief said it was the latest of 14 correspondences he had sent to the Prime Minister and others over seven years, beginning shortly after Secret Bay entered the CBI programme in 2019.

Among his concerns is an allegation that Dominica’s CBI programme has been undermined by the sale of citizenship below legally established prices.

Nassief argues that discounted citizenship has diverted money away from the Treasury and legitimate CBI-approved real-estate projects.

“A commission of inquiry really would be a very suitable way to deal with this, to bring in an independent commission to look at what has been going on, and get that forensic audit.”

Nassief says his first warning to the government came shortly after Secret Bay joined Dominica’s CBI programme.

He told journalists that his initial letter to Prime Minister Skerrit was dated October 1, 2019. He subsequently sent 13 more letters.

According to Nassief, those communications raised concerns about discounted citizenship, the use of agreements and arrangements that were not publicly available, and construction projects allegedly proceeding without the required planning approvals.

He says he also met repeatedly with the Prime Minister, ministers, the Attorney General and the President in an effort to resolve the concerns privately.

His latest letter, dated June 17, 2026, requested a hearing before Parliament.

“I’ve done everything that I possibly can. So I finally thought maybe the right thing is to request a hearing of parliament,  share everything, to discuss it, to raise the urgency of it and it will fall from there.”

His decision to go public comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Dominica and the wider Eastern Caribbean, as international scrutiny of citizenship-by-investment programmes intensifies.

Yet Nassief insists his objective is not to end CBI.

Instead, he says he wants to preserve a programme he considers critical to Dominica’s economy by restoring transparency, enforcing the law and rebuilding international confidence.

“The CBI programme is very critical to Dominica,” he told journalists. “I never wanted it stopped. I wanted it to be a programme managed with integrity and full transparency.”

Nassief is not an outside observer. Secret Bay, the luxury resort he developed, participates in Dominica’s CBI programme. That position places Nassief in an unusual position: he is both a major investor whose project benefits from the CBI programme and one of its most vocal critics. 

He acknowledged that taking his concerns public could expose both his business and its investors to fallout.

His argument, however, is that continued inaction presents a greater threat.

“Dominica should be aggressively seeking foreign direct investment that it’s not tied to CBI because we are mismanaging CBI, a vulnerable program. We are so dependent on it and we don’t have an alternative strategy to attract investment to the country.”

According to Nassief, the central problem is the emergence of what he describes as a heavily discounted pathway to Dominican citizenship through so-called social infrastructure projects.

He alleges that discounted schemes have allowed applicants to acquire citizenship for substantially less than the government’s prescribed price.

Nassief argues that the resulting price disparity has redirected business away from the Treasury and legitimate real-estate projects and towards discounted arrangements whose financial flows, he says, lack sufficient transparency.

The consequences, he contends, are being felt not only in government revenues but also across the CBI-funded construction sector.

Nassief pointed to stalled projects and said some legitimate developers were eventually forced to offer discounts themselves in an attempt to remain competitive.

He also linked the alleged discounting to a dramatic increase in the volume of citizenship applications.

According to figures he presented, Dominica’s CBI programme moved from issuing hundreds of passports annually in its earlier years to approximately 2,000 in 2017-18.

That figure rose to more than 6,000 annually between 2018 and 2022, approached 10,000 in 2023 and reached an estimated 6,484 passports in the first half of 2024 alone.

Nassief said the figures were drawn from information published by the European Union and acknowledged that some were estimates.

The allegations come as Dominica and other Eastern Caribbean countries face increasing international scrutiny over their citizenship programmes.

The United States has been pressing Eastern Caribbean countries to address concerns surrounding their citizenship programmes.

The European Union has also formally asked five Eastern Caribbean states to phase out their CBI schemes by June 2028, arguing that the programmes are incompatible with the bloc’s visa-free travel arrangements.

That international pressure has had personal implications for Nassief.

In June 2026, Nassief and his wife were denied renewal of their United States visas.

Nassief did not present that development as the reason for his campaign against the programme. Instead, he framed the issue as one of protecting Dominica’s international relationships and the investments already tied to CBI.

He said restoring confidence would require transparency, effective regulation and a programme that responds seriously to the concerns of international partners.

Nassief’s intervention also carries added weight because he is the current president of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association.

But he rejected any suggestion that the regional hotel association should be drawn into the dispute.

Nassief said he had not discussed the matter with the association and would not claim to represent its position.

“I am a citizen, I am an investor, a business person, and I’ve raised serious concerns for many years, documented them,” he said. “I think that should be enough.”

With the June letter now public, Nassief and his legal counsel say they are prepared to escalate the matter.

Their preferred next step is a Commission of Inquiry, which they say could independently examine the allegations and commission the forensic audit Nassief has requested.

That audit, he says, should examine the past ten years of the programme and establish where CBI funds have gone, how transactions have been structured and whether the laws governing the programme have been followed.

Failing an inquiry, Nassief and his legal counsel have indicated that judicial review and constitutional proceedings remain options.

Nassief is also calling for an independent regional regulator with genuine authority to audit, sanction and oversee CBI programmes.

He supports the OECS move towards regional regulation but has expressed concern about the proposed structure.

His concern is that a regulator cannot be genuinely independent if the governments whose programmes it regulates retain control over its policy direction.

After seven years of private warnings, Nassief says he has now reached the point where he is prepared to pursue legal action if necessary.

“I will do what’s necessary from a legal perspective to take these issues dealt with,” he told reporters.