Caribbean nation Dominica is accused of selling citizenship under its ‘citizenship by investment’ program, which allows the purchase of a passport for a base price of US$100,000, whereas Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit is accused of selling citizenship to oligarchs, officials from repressive regimes, politicians, human rights abusers, drug and weapon traffickers, money-launderers, and notorious criminals.
When issuing their new restrictions on citizens of Dominica, UK authorities did not elaborate on just who they are trying to keep out. But, having compiled the list of roughly 7,700 new Dominican passport holders — which is not believed to be complete — reporters found multiple troubling cases among them.
In some cases, Dominica passports were used by questionable people to set up companies long after they had been accused of crimes elsewhere.
Jordanian businessman Mutasem Faouri and his father Fayez acquired their Dominica passports in 2010. Two years later, they were arrested, charged with defrauding investors of tens of millions of dollars, and sentenced to prison terms. They are currently appealing these convictions.
But while the elder Faouri is currently serving a sentence on a related case, Mutasem, who also received a sentence, managed to evade prison. He has since set up companies in the United Kingdom, listing his nationality as “Dominica” and his country of residence as the United Arab Emirates. Neither Fayez nor Mutasem responded to requests for comment.
In another case, Spanish citizen Pedro Fort Berbel — who bought Dominican citizenship in 2015 — was accused two years later by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of running a Ponzi and multi-level marketing scheme at that time worth tens of millions of dollars.
The SEC won a US$26 million judgment against Berbel and his company, Fort Marketing Group LLC, in 2019 — and found that he had transferred millions of dollars to attorneys with bank accounts in Dominica at The Bank of Nova Scotia, FirstCaribbean International Bank, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
The SEC declined to comment on his case, and on whether any of the money had been repaid. Berbel and his legal team did not respond to OCCRP’s requests for comment.
Hassan Nasser Jaffar al-Lami is an Iraqi businessman who acquired Dominica citizenship in 2017 and continued to hold it till at least until 2022, when he used it to register a company in the UK.
In the meantime, however, he and the Iraqi Noor Islamic Bank, of which he was a shareholder, had come under scrutiny in several Arabic and international media outlets for his alleged role funneling dollars from auctions held by Iraq’s central bank to sanctioned or militant groups.
In January 2020 an anonymous source, identified as an employee of Iraq’s central bank, appeared on Lebanese TV station MTV and referred to Lami as the “financial Qassem Soleimani”, due to what she alleged was his companies’ use of fake invoices to launder money for militant groups.
The broadcast also included a leaked letter sent by the New York Federal Reserve in October 2019 asking Iraq’s central bank to stop providing dollars to Iraqi Noor Islamic Bank and several other entities because it suspected they could be “directly or indirectly” supplied to sanctioned people and entities.
The same year, The New York Times reported that Lami was “known in Iraqi financial circles” as “the king of fake invoices”.
This February, Iraqi outlet Erem News reported that Lami and his son had been arrested over allegations of dollar smuggling. The reports said Lami was released. Iraqi authorities didn’t respond to OCCRP’s request for information about the reason for Lami’s arrest or whether he was facing any formal charges.
OCCRP reporting also shows that an Iranian man used a Dominica passport to set up a company that was sanctioned by the United States last year for facilitating the sale of tens of millions of dollars of Iranian petrochemicals.
Dominica’s road to becoming a global passport hub was paved, at least in part, out of economic necessity.
By the 2000s, the island’s crucial banana industry had been rocked by a World Trade Organization ruling that eliminated favorable treatment it received from several European countries. That decision, as well as a couple of devastating hurricanes, plunged the island into crisis.
Outside support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “came with strings attached,” said Peter Clegg, an international relations professor at the University of the West of England Bristol. “Dominica had to cut social programs”.
Needing an alternate source of revenue, Dominica turned to passports. The decision was “about survival”, Clegg said. “Morality was not a factor”.
“Dominica didn’t have a coherent development strategy outside bananas”.
The island had legalized citizenship by investment in 1993, but it wasn’t until Roosevelt Skerrit’s tenure as prime minister that the country’s passports became popular with high-rollers from around the world.
The young new prime minister had inherited not only the banana-fueled crisis, but also a political one. Having been called in to fill out the end of his deceased predecessor’s term in 2004 and facing a near-immediate election, he needed both to deliver results for his people and raise money.
One source of cash was China. In the early 1990s, most Dominican citizenship buyers had been Taiwanese. But when Roosevelt Skerrit came to power, he pivoted to market the program to Chinese buyers, part of a larger reorientation of the country’s diplomacy towards China.
And Roosevelt Skerrit had plans beyond Asia — his administration began promoting Dominican passports around the world, looking for investors in places like Russia, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and even Bangladesh.
