Top Bahamian Lawyer Attacks Money-Laundering Legislation

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, New York

14 May 2002

Opening the First Annual Global Conference on Offshore Tax Planning, Compliance & Money Laundering in Nassau, The Bahamas, last week, Dr. Peter D. Maynard, President of the Bahamas Bar Association and the Organization of Commonwealth Carribbean Bar Association, attacked international pressure on 'small fragile countries primarily populated by people of colour'.

Dr Maynard said that the consequences of international action against money-laundering responses to last year's September 11th atrocities, including the Patriot Act, had a negative impact on small, fragile economies such as the Bahamas which are not in the mainstream of these events, but which depend to a very significant extent on providing financial services.

Said Dr Maynard: "In other words regardless of whatever view you take of the measures in the countries blacklisted by the FATF adopted under extreme pressure from the OECD pursuant to its so-called harmful tax initiative that OECD pressure has destabilized many of those fragile economics.

"The destabilization is not disputed. What is disputed is whether it is justifiable to sacrifice these countries at the altar of the war against money laundering. I suggest that it is not justifiable.

"It is not justifiable to take the blunderbuss approach and knock down innocent bystanders legitimately investing or carrying out a legitimate livelihood in international financial centres on par with any others. More money laundering goes on in a single day in London, New York or Tokyo than takes place in an entire year in the Bahamas, Cayman the Cook Islands or Nauru. There are double standards and loss of proportionality and perspective.

"It is not justifiable to cleverly equate tax avoidance and tax planning with terrorism and money laundering. It is not justifiable to abandon and abuse the Courts in the exercise of their jurisdiction to protect the rights of the individual. The means of obtaining information with the assistance of the courts - some jurisdictions such as Barbados and the Bahamas have as respectable and long a parliamentary and jurisprudential history then the United States - should be further utilized and refined."

Dr Maynard said that OECD-inspired legislation violates legal professional privilege, violates natural justice, circumvents the courts, or undermines the protection of the law, the administration of justice and the separation of powers. Saying that action was being taken in the Bahamas Supreme Court to test some of the country's newly-installed legislation, Dr Maynard said that the new laws violate lawful confidentiality and could even deprive lawyers and other professionals of their livelihood by imposing unduly onerous burdens.

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