Mehul Choksi, the fugitive jeweller. (File photo)

LONDON: London-headquartered Henley & Partners, which designs, implements and promotes citizenship-by-investment schemes, including the one in Antigua that fugitive jeweller Mehul Choksi entered under, has close links to scandal-hit firm SCL Elections, it has been revealed.

SCL Elections was the parent company of Cambridge Analytica.

SCL Elections and Cambridge Analytica, both of which were forced to close down in May following the Facebook data harvesting scandal, are linked to Henley & Partners, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee disinformation and ‘fake news’ interim report, published on Sunday, states.

SCL also worked on election campaigns in countries in which Christian Kalin, chairman of Henley & Partners, either ran or subsequently launched citizenship-by-investment programmes, involving the selling of countries’ passports to investors, according to the report.

On its website, Henley & Partners, which has offices across the world, claims to have “created the concept of residence and citizenship planning in the 1990s”. It states proudly: “Henley & Partners has been responsible for more than US$7 billion foreign direct investment and has designed, co-advised or been mandated to implement the most successful residence and citizenship programmes worldwide. The programmes of Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis and Malta have been designed by Henley & Partners under relevant Government mandates.”

The 89-page DCMS report states, in a chapter titled ‘SCL influence in foreign elections’: “We were told that behind much of SCL Elections’ campaigning work was the hidden hand of Christian Kalin, chairman of Henley& Partners, who arranged for investors to supply the funding to pay for campaigns, and then organised SCL to write their manifesto and oversee the whole campaign process. In exchange, SCL Group director Alexander Nix told us, Henley & Partners would gain exclusive passport rights for that country, under a citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programme. Nix and Kalin have been described as having a ‘Faustian pact’. With the passport rights came a government that would be conducive to Mr Kalin and his clients.”

Choksi, a key accused in the multi-crore Punjab National Bank fraud who is wanted by Indian authorities, took Antiguan citizenship in November 2017 under its citizenship-by-investment programme.

Henley & Partners helped launch Malta’s citizenship-by-investment programme and controls the selling of its citizenship to eligible investors at a cost of €900,000 (Rs 7 crore) per passport.

Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia , who was killed by a car bomb in October 2017, was at the time investigating Malta’s citizenship-by-investment scheme as well as “organised crime in Malta”, the report states.

In further evidence of close links between Henley & Partners and SCL Group, the report states: “The evidence shows that Kalin asked SCL to introduce him to the prime minister of Malta, Joseph Muscat, when he was Leader of the Opposition in June 2011, and indicates that SCL had been advising Malta’s Labour Party for several years before the 2013 elections.” Labour won that election.

Henley & Partners have held the exclusive passport rights for St Kitts and Nevis since pre-2009. By 2014, passport had become St Kitts and Nevis’ biggest source of income with the revenue from it accounting for around 25 per cent of GDP, the report states.

“Many of the passport holders are from countries with unpopular passports, who may otherwise have trouble obtaining travel visas—think Iran, China, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan,” the report adds. “In 2010, STM had used Henley & Partners to help the Ukrainian politician, Viacheslav Suprunenko, apply for a passport in St Kitts and Nevis. He was at the time wanted by Interpol for assault during an armed robbery to recover documents in a business dispute.”

The final DCMS Committee report is expected by the end of the year.

