Saboto Caesar, the former SVG agriculture minister who lost his seat in November, arrives in Basseterre on July 19 to help the Federation build a banking framework for medicinal cannabis.
Caribbean / Regional Affairs
St Kitts Hires a Vincentian to Crack the Cannabis Banking Problem SVG Never Fully Solved
Saboto Caesar, the former SVG agriculture minister who lost his seat in November, arrives in Basseterre on July 19 to help the Federation build a banking framework for medicinal cannabis.
Saint Kitts and Nevis has turned to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines for help with the single hardest problem in Caribbean cannabis policy: getting a bank to touch the money.
The St. Kitts and Nevis Medicinal Cannabis Authority has engaged Saboto Caesar, the former Vincentian Minister of Agriculture, to assist the Federation in developing a banking framework for its medicinal cannabis industry, according to a statement issued Friday by the St. Kitts and Nevis Information Service.
Nadiv Mills, Chief Executive Officer of the Authority, told reporters on Wednesday, July 15, that Caesar is credited with the success of the cannabis wellness industry in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and is expected in Basseterre shortly.
He was very instrumental in setting up the banking framework for St. Vincent’s Nadiv Mills, CEO, SKN Medicinal Cannabis Authority
Mills said Caesar is scheduled to arrive on July 19 for a visit of roughly five days, during which he will help design solutions for the Federation.
What the visit covers
During the engagement, Caesar is to meet representatives of financial institutions to better understand the difficulties banks face in servicing a medicinal cannabis sector. He is also expected to walk them through the policies and practices that allowed Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to become the first member of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States to export medicinal cannabis.
Saint Kitts and Nevis will also unveil its track and trace system to those institutions. The technology, known in the trade as seed-to-sale software, logs transactions across the supply chain, and the Authority says it is intended to improve transparency, support compliance, and strengthen industry operations.
That is not a side detail. Seed-to-sale auditability is usually the first thing a compliance officer asks for, because a bank that cannot trace a dollar back to a licensed plant cannot defend the account to its own correspondent.
The record behind the hire
The Vincentian export milestone is real, and worth stating precisely. In January 2022, Kingstown approved its first medicinal cannabis export certificate, granted to Caribbean Cannabis Company trading as Medicinal, after Germany’s Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices issued an import certificate allowing the product to enter that country legally. A shipment of roughly 50 kilograms followed later that month. Caesar, then agriculture minister, used the moment to invite other OECS states with established frameworks to join what he called a sub-regional medicinal wellness ecosystem.
The SKNIS statement describes that milestone as following the receipt of an export licence from Germany. The sequence was slightly different: Germany issued an import certificate, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines issued the export certificate.
Caesar’s political standing has changed since then. He contested South Central Windward for the Unity Labour Party in the November 27, 2025 general election and lost the seat, taking 1,984 votes, or 46.2 percent. He was one of two senior ULP figures widely tipped as future party leaders to be defeated that night, alongside former finance minister Camillo Gonsalves. Former Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves was the only ULP candidate returned to the House.
Why banking is the choke point
Cannabis remains illegal at the United States federal level. The large American banks that act as correspondents for Caribbean institutions will not knowingly clear cannabis proceeds, and a regional bank that accepts them risks losing the relationship that lets it move US dollars at all.
Attorney General Garth Wilkin put the stakes bluntly in the St Kitts and Nevis National Assembly on March 31, 2026, explaining why full legalisation is not on the table:
- Correspondent banking relationships would, in his words, almost come to an end.
- The result would be irreparable harm to the Federation’s banking system.
- Trade, remittances, and ordinary overseas transactions would all be affected.
The medicinal and religious carve-outs exist precisely because they are narrow enough to survive that test. The banking framework is the mechanism for proving it.
Why this matters in Kingstown
The obvious reading is flattering. A Vincentian is being paid to export Vincentian expertise, and the Federation is buying it because SVG got there first. Kingstown built the laboratory, cleared the German regulator, and put the first OECS shipment on a plane.
The less comfortable reading is that the problem Caesar is being hired to solve is one Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has been working on since at least 2020, when the Medicinal Cannabis Authority listed the establishment of a legal correspondent banking framework for international transfers among its stated objectives. Six years on, cannabis banking in this region remains awkward, expensive, and heavily dependent on a small number of willing institutions. Nobody in the Eastern Caribbean has made it routine.
There is also a question worth putting to our own side. The industry Caesar helped build was a ULP project, and the government that inherited it is the New Democratic Party administration of Prime Minister Godwin Friday. Whether the incoming Kingstown government intends to continue, restructure, or quietly shelve the medicinal cannabis push has not been set out in detail. If the expertise is good enough for Basseterre to import, it is fair to ask what is being done with it at home.
Caesar’s assessment of what the banks in St Kitts tell him this week will be the most useful thing to come out of the visit, whether or not it is made public. Vincypowa News will follow the outcome.