St Kitts and Nevis: RLB Airport not for sale’ – Liburd’s privatization claim a false call

St Kitts and Nevis: The Robert L Bradshaw Airport in St Kitts and Nevis is a public asset which is owned by the people of the Federation and operated by the St. Christopher Air and Sea Ports Authority (SCASPA), and it is not being privatised, confirmed the reports. 

This comes after Ian ‘Patches’ Liburd in his recent podcast ‘Straight Talks’ claimed that the airport project is secretly sold out even though its expansion was officially announced and documented.  

In his podcast, he claimed that the Prime Minister went with a company by the name of Caribbean Infrastructure Development Corporation (CIDC) with which he had already signed an agreement to privatise the RLB International Airport under the CBI Public Benefit Option.  

Reportedly, the approval of the airport expansion under the CBI Public Benefit Option was published in December 2024 on public platforms and the arrangement with CIDC has been openly promoted as a flagship project of CBI Programme. Experts say that this clearly shows that the only secret here is perhaps that Liburd chose not to inform himself.  

Following these claims, sources have confirmed that there has been no transfer of ownership or control of the airport to any private entity and the claim that the airport was ‘sold off’ or privatized is entirely false.

Moreover, Liburd, who is a former Minister of Public Infrastructure and Transport was himself implicated in serious breaches of airport protocol. Notably, in April 2019, while in office, he was reported to have repeatedly bypassed security at RLB Airport and violated international safety rules.

These incidents were allegedly severe enough that the safety rating of the airport was downgraded by global authorities shortly thereafter. It was reported that Liburd misbehaved with security officials and also refused to comply with standard checks on several occasions. Experts claim that instead of addressing these breaches transparently, then then-government tried to brush them off as rumours, despite the fact that there was video evidence.

Experts further claim, “The person now crying lack of transparency was himself involved in an actual incident that endangered airport security and was hushed up.” They further questioned that is his current outcry genuinely about public interest or is it politically motivated finger pointing.