Barbados Attacked By Fellow Tax Havens

by Amanda Banks, Tax-News.com, London

06 March 2002

According to a report in Tuesday's Financial Times, Barbados has been attacked by fellow Caribbean offshore havens for letting the side down by agreeing to cooperate with the OECD in order to secure removal from its 'blacklist'.

The jurisdiction has reportedly been accused of weakening the position of the havens which remain on the OECD's list, and which face sanctions such as the dismantling of favourable tax treaties.

'Barbados jumped the gun and put pressure on the rest of the small jurisdictions in the Eastern Caribbean,' an unnamed official from St Vincent and the Grenadines is quoted by the FT as complaining. 'When that happened, we realised that the strength in numbers which we had achieved had been lost, and that the plan for a common approach had been torpedoed,' he continued.

However, the Barbadian authorities have denied that they have made any concessions to the multilateral organisation. Lynette Eastmond, the jurisdiction's Director of International Business told the newspaper that: 'Barbados was not required to sign a memorandum of understanding with the OECD to change anything, as there was nothing to change.'

Indeed, this was recognised as a blow against the OECD at the time that the agreement was announced, with the President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, Andrew Quinlan, commenting at the beginning of February that: 'For the last eighteen months, the OECD has said that the only way to get off the 'blacklist' was to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) emasculating tax competition, financial privacy and fiscal sovereignty. In fact, however, Barbados did not sign an MOU.'

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