The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas is the world’s “best positioned” financial centre when it comes to thriving in an automatic tax information exchange environment, a Cabinet Minister said yesterday.

Speaking after the G-20/OECD dropped all pretence and confirmed that they wanted the automatic exchange of tax information to become the global standard, Ryan Pinder, minister of financial services, said the fact it was not a ‘one trick pony’ played to the Bahamas’ advantage.

Emphasising that last week’s OECD/G-20 statement had caught no one in the financial services industry by surprise, Mr Pinder told Tribune Business: “Industry has seen this coming, seen change happening in other jurisdictions.

“We have said for many years that the Bahamas needs to hold itself out as a financial and business centre with a wide range of products and services. The days of the Bahamas or any jurisdiction being exclusively used for tax purposes has long gone years ago.”

The US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was a concrete example of the automatic exchange of tax information coming into practice, but Mr Pinder said the Bahamas would be able to withstand this with the Government, regulators and private sector working as one.

“I think the Bahamas is best positioned of any financial centre to grow and be a financial centre of confidence going forward,” Mr Pinder told Tribune Business. “There are excellent opportunities unrelated to tax.

“The Bahamas has the most wide-ranging products and services, and a very big selection is why we are best positioned.

“The Bahamas provides, at a number of levels, significant value-added to service providers. That helps differentiate us and shows we’re a true international financial and business centre, not a single purpose jurisdiction. That’s an important distinction to make.”

Mr Pinder added that the ‘automatic’ push would not affect companies and high net worth individuals looking to minimise their tax burden through legitimate means, and who were in compliance with their home country tax laws.

The US and other countries allowed legitimate tax planning and avoidance through their own domestic laws, and Mr Pinder said the Bahamas’ domestic, well-trained professional financial services workforce provided it with a further advantage.

“We’ve had to be nimble for decades, and it’s not had a terminal effect,” Mr Pinder said of the Bahamas constantly having to respond, and adjust, to international tax-related initiatives over the past two decades.