CIFSA to step up tax campaign

The chairman of the Cayman Islands Financial Services Association, Mr Anthony Travers OBE said: “As a number of us have been predicting, we see now the hidden agenda revealed for the first time in pure terms.

“The ‘one size fits all global tax rate’ has evidently been the real OECD objective for over a decade, from the publication of the ‘Harmful Tax Competition’ initiative in 1997, which regarded all forms of competitive tax rate as a threat to the sustainability of the high levels of tax in the highly industrialised countries .

“The recognition by the OECD of Cayman’s true white-list credentials and compliance on tax transparency has left the G20 nations no option but to come clean on their true long term intentions.

“Of course the objective is unobtainable. The EU jurisdictions and indeed the US are in no economic position to dictate a global rate of tax to the power house BRIC economies and so the initiative is doomed to failure.

“We have seen already how readily PRC will leap to the defence of Hong Kong and Macau. The issue for Cayman is one of long- term strategy and with which economies it seeks to align more closely.

“Obviously CIFSA continues to provide its advice to The Cayman Islands Government on these matters.  The CIFSA public relations campaigns should now be stepped up. It will be a good deal less problematic to counter these arguments on grounds of pure economics now the tax evasion stigma is finally removed from the debate.”