Who It’s For

Property in more than one country and children at school somewhere neither parent grew up. A signed letter of intent, and a closing date that has started to govern every other decision. An Eastern Caribbean development nobody can underwrite from a desk. Three situations, none of them a bracket of wealth, and each one expensive to take in the wrong order.

Two or three generations, a passport or two between them, property in more than one country, and children in school somewhere that is not where the parents grew up. Each piece is ordinary; the combination is not.

The call is rarely a crisis. It is a small discovery — a trust deed drafted around a country the family left in 2019, or a citizenship unit asking for a source-of-funds trail through an account the private banker opened without telling the accountant. Four advisors, each correct inside their own border, and a plan nobody designed.

Presence, not paperwork, decides the tax result. Anguilla’s High Value Resident program and Act 60 both run on nights actually spent on the ground, and Antigua & Barbuda is the only citizenship program that asks for presence at all. I ask the day-count question before the price question.

Weeks one and two are one long conversation and no proposal; by week six, a written sequence; weeks seven to twelve, the irreversible decisions in order — tax base, structure, program, property. I would rather a family walk an island in September than sign after a sales weekend in February.

Pre-exit and freshly post-exit are not the same client: a business under letter of intent, or a number sitting in one account and decisions that were cheaper last quarter.

Timing is the whole thing, and it is not close. Act 60 covers gains arising after the move, so a founder who relocates the month after the wire lands has paid for the exercise and bought very little of it. The moves worth making expire quietly, and nothing announces the deadline. So week one fixes the closing date, everything else works backwards from there, and cross-border tax counsel sits alongside my team from the start.

The E-2 claim is the one the industry sells worst. Grenada is the only Caribbean citizenship-by-investment country with a US E-2 treaty, in force since 1989. What almost nobody flags is a December 2022 provision in the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act: anyone who acquired treaty-country citizenship through investment must show a continuous period of domicile, at least three years, before qualifying for an E-1 or E-2 visa. The long version.

Program mechanics sit on the costs and timelines page. In a fair number of these files the right answer was to do less.

Whether a family should build an office at all is answered on the family office services page. What an office hires me for is narrower: coverage. New York, London or Toronto can underwrite almost anything except an Eastern Caribbean development, where land tenure is not uniform and completion records sit nowhere an analyst can reach.

Before an office lets a client wire a cent, my team and I run five checks — the capital stack, title, infrastructure, the location on foot and not from the back of a car, and the unit itself. Escrow deserves the same suspicion: in citizenship marketing the word often means the developer’s own account, so ask who controls disbursement, in writing. The file that taught me to check the concrete separately from the sales deck is Harlequin, which sold 8,211 units off-plan and built 176. The full checklist.

The work is that I go and look, against the developments we cover and what is genuinely approved. That matters most on the day the answer is no.

Saying this in the first ten minutes is cheaper than saying it in month four.

Anyone who wants the cheapest possible passport and nothing else. If price is the only criterion, an agent competing on price will beat me, and should — who should actually buy a second citizenship is a shorter list than the industry implies. The bloc-wide minimum became US$200,000 from 1 July 2024; shopping the floor buys a document with no tax base underneath it.

Anyone who wants a guaranteed investment return. Nobody can promise one, and Caribbean rental cash flow is harder than it looks. If a competing pitch carries a guaranteed yield or buyback, that clause is the thing to diligence hardest.

Anyone whose only objective is a lower US tax bill. A second passport does not move a US citizen out of the US net: worldwide income stays taxable wherever they live, and not one of the five Caribbean programs sits under a US income tax treaty. What the passport buys is mobility — insurance rather than a tax play. Cross-border arrangements more often add reporting than remove tax. And if the plan is one product in isolation, a specialist will do it better and more cheaply.

My team works alongside the advisors you already have — they hold the history and the filings, we hold the seams. Mandates that run past coordination into execution route onward to a dedicated specialist private-capital practice. I have no product to place and no fund to fill.

The client-side perspective is not a marketing line. I left Canada in 2020 and paid for the sequencing lesson personally, then acquired my own second citizenship in 2022. Over the past 18 months the practice has guided more than 100 families through citizenship and residency and handled over US$75 million in regional transactions — the longer version is on the about page.