Member States of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) have formed a group to formulate and implement strategies which will articulate CARICOM’s position in the face of continued attacks on the Region’s offshore sector by the G7 through three agencies it has established.
The CARICOM group is called the Caribbean Association of Regulators of International Business (CARIB) and it is scheduled to meet in late August. Economic Adviser to the Secretary-General of the Caribbean Community, Dr. Maurice Odle has informed that the new group will be instrumental in terms of the Region’s response to the charges being leveled against it by the G7 through its agencies. The agencies are the Organisation of Economic Cooperation Development (OECD), the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and they are supported by the G7 grouping which includes the United States of America, Canada, Italy, France, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.
The issue of the OECD defined Harmful Tax Policy engaged the attention of CARICOM Heads of Government at their 21st Regular Meeting in St. Vincent and the Grenadines early July . They then decided to form a special committee to discuss the Region’s response.
The Committee met in St. Kitts and Nevis in July and reported to the Bureau of Heads of Government which is comprised of the sitting Chairman, Sir James Mitchell, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the incoming Chairman, Prime Minister Owen Arthur of Barbados, immediate past Chairman Dr. Denzil Douglas, Prime Minister, St. Kitts and Nevis and CARICOM Secretary-General, Mr. Edwin Carrington.
The OECD along with the FSF and the FATF were created by the G7, and in recent times the G7 though the three organisations have orchestrated a series of unilateral activities that are inconsistent with international practices, and designed to impair the competitive capacity of Caribbean jurisprudence in the provision of a global financial service.
In a report of 26 June 2000, the OECD listed jurisdictions as tax havens because these countries have competitive tax regimes. The FATF identified countries in its 22 June 2000 report as “non competitive jurisdictions” in the prevention of money laundering, while the FSF in its 26 May 2000 Report, categorised Caribbean jurisdictions with Offshore Financial Centres based on a unilateral evaluation of the quality of supervision of these jurisdictions even as its Report found that “Offshore Financial activities are not inimical to global and financial stability.”
The three reports were prepared by bodies in which the Caribbean has no representation, and were based on incomplete information on standards set unilaterally by these agencies.
