Business View Caribbean - July 2016 45
add 60 or 70 rooms, which would roughly double the
property in size.”
The new rooms will be called the Residence Club at
Bay Gardens Beach Resort, and according to Destang,
they will be more exclusive and offer more ameni-
ties. They will also qualify as an approved real estate
investment project under St. Lucia’s newly-launched
Citizen by Investment Program, as the island becomes
the fifth Caribbean nation, after Antigua and Barbuda,
Dominica, Grenada, and St. Kitts & Nevis, to offer such
an option.
Destang believes that the program is particularly at-
tractive to people who are from countries with visa re-
strictions, such as Russia, China, and parts of the Mid-
dle East, “and some Americans,” he adds, “perhaps,
because of all the tax and other regulations, may want
to become a citizen of another country and renounce
their U.S. citizenship. That’s not as common, but it has
happened a few times.”
Destang is not unaware of the Program’s economic po-
tential. “It’s given us another opportunity to diversify
our product mix,” he says. “We’ve been selling time
shares for many years and have three to four hundred
owners, right now. And this allows us to get into an-
other field of investment and another way to raise the
capital needed to make this project a reality.”
In addition to his duties running Bay Gardens, another
hat that Sanovnik wears is the presidency of the St.
Lucia Hotel and Tourism Association (SLHTA), the is-
land’s largest private sector organization whose mem-
bers include hotels, restaurants, airlines, banks, tours
and attractions, and destination management compa-
nies, among others.
He talks about some of the group’s recent initiatives:
“We have quite a few exciting projects that we’re work-
ing on, which already have benefitted the industry,”
he begins. “One of the major ones of late is the Ag-
ricultural and Tourism Linkages Program. Agriculture
was previously St. Lucia’s mainstay which gave way to
tourism. And for years, we sort of treated the two as
separate and competing priorities, when, in truth, the
two can work in harmony.”
