Not a cent from govt fund to be spent on Jail Project, says PM Harris

Prime Minister of St Kitts and Nevis, Dr Timothy Harris, released a statement on the commotion on his administration's 'Jail Project', clearing the air that no government money will be spent on the construction of correctional facility.

Putting light on the funding to be obtained for the project, PM Harris informed the project would be financed by the investors via the Alternative Investment Option of the Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programme.

"The idea behind this was to let people come in with the money, build things that the country needs and in return, we will provide them with the opportunity to participate in our CBI programme", noted PM Harris.

While targeting and indirectly referring to the ministers of PAM-CCM, Mark Brantley and Shawn K Richards, the prime minister noted, "I want to make it clear that contrary to what some former ministers are saying that this facility will cost us $2.25 billion, tell them not one cent of government money is going to that. Not one cent!".

"Our citizens and residents there, they are people too. They have their sons and their daughters, mothers and fathers, who want to know that in our prisons, they are safe. The human rights body has written to us time and time again and said the prison was overcrowded and that we needed a new one, and everybody agrees. The problem was that we couldn't find the money to build, at that time, a modern prison. And so, recognizing that by ignoring the problem it will not go away, we had to find creative ways to do the right thing for our citizens", underscored the prime minister.

The statement comes after the Premier of Nevis, Brantley and Richards, in a recent media conference, claimed the project cost had witnessed a hike from ECD 88 Million to 2.25 Billion, and that the project is only beneficial to Harris government.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Citizenship by Investment Unit (CIU), Les Khan, in his reply, called the statements' misleading' that claimed the government will fund the project.

He stated, "There's an assumption here that $2.2 billion EC dollars is being taken away from the people of St. Kitts and Nevis. There is no $2.2 billion. There is 5,000, 5,500 or whatever the number is in terms of the number of shares that have been allocated to assist the developer in recovering their investment".

"To quote a number like $2.2 billion is basically misleading in the sense that it's assuming that the developer is selling at $175,000. Now, the difference between the privately-funded and the state-owned [categories under the Alternative Investment Option] is that the privately-funded is at $200,000, and the state-owned is at $175,000 for a family of four. In both initiatives - one thing happens [and that is] that the developer, regardless of which side of the fence it is, pays government fees. So if we were to truly look at the new correctional facility and we look at how much money the country would actually get from that, it would be hundreds of millions of US dollars…and that would be over a period of one, two, three years or whatever it takes for the developer to be able to sell those units of investment. So $2.2 billion doesn't exist. It's never coming out of the government's coffers—actually, there is the money going into the government coffers".