The chair­man of the Chair­man of the Cit­i­zen­ship by In­vest­ment (CBI) Unit, Richard Dun­can, says Grena­da has EC$54.6 mil­lion (One EC dol­lar=US$0.37 cents) in its con­tin­gency fund at the St. Kitts-based East­ern Caribbean Cen­tral Bank (EC­CB).

The fund re­flects the gov­ern­ment’s de­posit of 10 per cent from the month­ly in­flow of rev­enue earned through the Na­tion­al Trans­for­ma­tion Fund of the Cit­i­zen­ship by In­vest­ment pro­gramme.

Un­der the CBI pro­gramme, for­eign in­vestors are grant­ed cit­i­zen­ship of the coun­try in re­turn for mak­ing a sub­stan­tial in­vest­ment in the so­cio-eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment of Grena­da.

Dun­can said that since 2023 the gov­ern­ment be­gan putting aside re­al mon­ey in­to con­tin­gency fund which is a re­quire­ment of the Pub­lic Fi­nance Man­age­ment Act.

“Pre­vi­ous­ly, the law said 40 per cent must go in­to that con­tin­gency fund, not a black cent went in…since 2014. From 2022 it was re­duced to 10 per cent and it has been lodged at the EC­CB to the ag­gre­gat­ed to­tal now of EC$54.6 mil­lion,” Dun­can said in an in­ter­view on the week­ly The Bubb Re­port pro­gramme on Sun­day.

“It’s a buffer fund, even Hur­ri­cane Beryl was not a suf­fi­cient dis­rup­tion to draw down on that mon­ey, it has to be a ma­jor eco­nom­ic shock,” Dun­can said.

The rev­enue to the gov­ern­ment for the year 2024 through the CBI pro­gramme was EC$472,981,142 ac­cord­ing to the re­cent da­ta re­lease by the In­vest­ment Mi­gra­tion Agency, the agency re­spon­si­ble for ad­min­is­ter­ing the CBI pro­gramme.

Ac­cord­ing to the NTF reg­u­la­tion, the fund is man­age by a board of di­rec­tors and the mon­ey in it can be used to meet the oblig­a­tion un­der reg­u­la­tion 9 which states that “In every fi­nan­cial year, the Board shall al­lo­cate the first 24 mil­lion dol­lars of pay­ments in­to the Fund to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund for the sole pur­pose of pay­ment of bud­get ex­pen­di­ture ar­rears.”

The Con­tin­gency fund can al­so be used to re­duce bud­get ex­pen­di­ture ar­rears; to meet the ob­jec­tive of the Fund to re­struc­ture, re­pay or re­pur­chase debt; or to pro­vide re­lief from a na­tion­al dis­as­ter.

The NTF reg­u­la­tions al­so states that the fund can­not be used for the bor­row­ing or tak­ing on of any con­tin­gent li­a­bil­i­ty in the form of a guar­an­tee or oth­er­wise.

“The Fund shall not be used for the lend­ing of mon­ey to the Gov­ern­ment of Grena­da, any State-Owned En­ter­prise or any Statu­to­ry Body,” it notes.