How Cambridge Analytica Fueled A Shady Global Passport Bonanza

From Fast Company, July 1:

A controversial billion-dollar citizenship-for-sale trouble organisation led the elections theatre to comport surreptitious campaigns across the Caribbean, insiders say.

In 2010, equally elections neared inwards Saint Kitts too Nevis, a grainy hidden-camera video was uploaded to YouTube. In the anonymously produced clip, voters across the pocket-size Eastern Caribbean Area isle patch saw prime number government minister candidate Lindsey Grant inwards a hotel room, listening equally a British-accented belongings developer promises him a $1.5 meg payment inwards telephone commutation for a create out cost on a plot of authorities land.

“What we’re later on is making certain you lot larn into power,” says the developer, whose seem upward too vocalism are obscured. In return, “you volition assist us. . . how does that sound?”

Grant, a Harvard Law School-educated lawyer running on an anti-corruption platform, appears reluctant, but eventually pushes the bribe higher, to $1.7 million. The video cuts to white text on black: “He sold his province too the people’s the world simply to win power.”

The video went viral inwards Saint Kitts, too the incumbent prime number minister, Denzil Douglas, was shortly re-elected for a quaternary term. Douglas denied whatsoever noesis of the sting operation, but across the Caribbean, speculation swirled that it was the function of a surreptitious London-based political consultancy: SCL Group.

The now-defunct Anglo-American theatre has gained notoriety for its harvesting of Facebook profiles too shady elbow grease tactics, but the storm of contention has been edifice for decades. Before its younger sibling, Cambridge Analytica, worked for Donald Trump, SCL Group claimed to accept built a portfolio of political function inwards 3 dozen countries, deploying its “behavioral change” tactics inwards sometimes shaky democracies.

In the Eastern Caribbean, where SCL quietly operated inwards at to the lowest degree half-dozen countries, simply about of its function had an indirect objective: Assisting a lucrative merchandise inwards passports. The sales are legal, too lucrative, alongside the world’s rich idea to pass over $2 billion on “citizenship yesteryear investment,” or CBI. But reporting too interviews alongside manufacture insiders exhibit how a nexus of buyers, officials, citizenship agents, too consultants has helped enable criminals too ignited political wildfires that proceed to rage fifty-fifty now.

In at to the lowest degree 5 Caribbean Area nations, the company’s campaigns were backed yesteryear Christian H. Kalin, the primary executive of Henley too Partners, a London-based theatre that markets too sells minute passports, too helped back upward politicians idea to endure sympathetic to Henley’s interests. With a friendly pol inwards office, according to people familiar alongside the arrangement, Henley could too thence larn that country’s primary passport merchant, giving it the correct to earn lucrative commissions on every sale.

Where SCL worked on campaigns, inwards simply about cases alongside back upward from Christian Kalin. View a Earth map of its elections work. [Map: Wikipedia / Infogram / Fast Company]

“It was a detail agency of achieving his strategic objective, which was to furnish coin too furnish elbow grease provision to pose inwards to ability the authorities that would endure conducive to both him too his clients,” Sven Hughes, who worked on the campaigns equally SCL’s caput of elections from 2009 to 2010, told Fast Company. To win elections, he said, SCL’s then-CEO Alexander Nix regularly turned to questionable techniques, including the hidden-camera video. ...

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