Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell joined fellow Caribbean Heads of Government at Saint Lucia’s 2026 Caribbean Investment Summit (CIS26) for what was, in operational terms, the most consequential CBI policy conversation the region has held in years. The summit’s opening panel — “A New Era of Regulation: Teasing Out the Opportunities and Challenges for Caribbean CBI” — placed Mitchell, Pierre, Browne, Skerrit, and Drew on the same stage, defending Citizenship by Investment programmes that have come under sustained pressure from Washington, London, and Brussels.
Grenada’s CBI programme is the smallest of the five Eastern Caribbean schemes by transaction volume but among the more carefully regulated. Mitchell’s panel posture has been consistent through 2026: CBI must deliver tangible national benefit (housing, infrastructure, climate resilience), regulatory standards must converge with major-market expectations, and the small-island-developing-state argument needs to be defended in technical detail rather than asserted as political principle.
The CIS26 framing — “The Convergence Advantage in Global Capital and Mobility” — is the regional pivot. Caribbean CBI programmes are no longer single-passport transactions. They are integrated wealth-management products that intersect with estate planning, asset protection, and multi-jurisdictional portfolio structuring. The US Treasury’s increasing scrutiny, the UK’s visa-policy realignment, and the European Union’s pending proposals all sit on top of that integration question. Mitchell, Pierre, and Drew know it. The CIS26 panel was where they said it publicly.
For Grenadian diaspora following the political economy at home, the CBI conversation matters because CBI inflows fund housing initiatives, infrastructure projects, and disaster-recovery investment that diaspora remittance alone cannot replace. The regulatory tightening is real. The diplomatic work to keep the programme operational under stricter compliance frameworks is the work that defines whether Grenada’s CBI generates revenue or generates headaches over the next eighteen months.
Mitchell returned to Grenada following his CIS26 sessions. The closing announcement of CIS27’s host country is expected later this week.