Feeling the pain of tighter tax reporting laws, Bahamas – an offshore financial centre, has complained to United Nations (UN) that high-powered States are trying to force their will on smaller nations and cut off their livelihood.
Speaking at the UN headquarters in New York, Bahamas Prime Minister Perry Christie said, "We see this same dynamic at work in the ongoing economic aggression of many of the more developed countries against small offshore financial service-based economies, especially in the Caribbean region of which The Bahamas is a part."
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The reference is mainly at the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands, two of the region’s largest offshore financial centres and focus of British efforts to bring into son-of-FATCA, the UK’s version of the US laws to monitor automatic tax information sharing.
"Some have used their power either unilaterally or in small groups of high-powered nations to impose their will, arguing that there is something fundamentally immoral, something intrinsically sinister, about the accumulation of wealth in offshore jurisdictions.
"We reject, that premise and we criticize in the strongest possible terms the efforts of some to maim and cripple, if not destroy, the offshore economies within our region," he said.
Christie called on the UN to take over formulating global governance of the offshore financial sector.
He also protested that if offshore financial services economies failed, jobs would be lost and many well-off middle class workers in the sector would ‘slip back into poverty’ or move overseas.
