Finance Minister Says Bermuda Has Not "Sold Out" Over OECD Deal

Lisa Ugur, Tax-news.com, London

17 July 2000

The brouhaha over the recent OECD report on harmful tax havens seems to have turned a corner. Now that those jurisdictions "named and shamed" are coming to terms with the OECD list, certain offshore financial centres which pulled out all the stops to avoid it now find themselves defending their efforts to co-operate with the OECD, Bermuda being a prime example.

Last week Minister of Finance Eugene Cox announced certain details of Bermuda's deal with the OECD, highlighting a number of areas in which Bermuda would bring itself in line with OECD requirements, and yet he now finds accusations of Bermuda "selling out" levelled at him.

There has been considerable suspicion and consternation amongst the business community in Bermuda as to why full details of the agreement have not been made public. Mr Cox has hit back by saying that there was no hidden agenda in not publishing the controversial annexe with the OECD or its full contents, and that his statement of the previous week in the House of Assembly listed clearly and in detail what was in the document. He said that the document was only "several pages" long and even went so far as to say that if he had misled the House of Assembly on the contents of the annexe, he would be obliged to resign.

Of his critics, Mr Cox said 'I think the problem comes because we have not had to move as much as some countries, and what they haven't grasped is that we do not have that much to do and we are given plenty of time for the changes. By 2003, there will have been another election and who is going to go into an election with an agenda which is selling the country out?'

Mr Cox said that instead of signing away Bermuda's rights, the annexe in fact guaranteed more freedom to Bermuda: 'I have given a lot of the detail. The annexe was a qualifying document for the letter, and it staked out our claims. We are not using it to trick people. It is the Government's commitment to the community and what we talked about on Friday was this and spelt out what is in the annexe.'

However, the nagging question remains: if the annex is so uncontroversial, then why not publish it? It seems that the Bermuda business community are going to take a lot more persuading that the government's deal with the OECD is not going to work out to their detriment. It is still early days and only time will tell just what the effects will be on local business.

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