An empire of tax havens

Harry Phibbs puts forward a fine idea in CAPX.


It’s time for Britain to build an empire of tax havens

• If the Chagos Islands were a low-tax utopia, we wouldn't have given them away
• Tax havens are places where enterprise and freedom are celebrated
• It's about time we destigmatised nations where taxes are low

What are we getting in return? That has been the question critics of the Government have been asking over surrendering the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. You can call it a ‘sell out’, as we are making a payment. In a way, though, that query misses the point. When some of us flick a globe and pause at the Indian Ocean to spot the words ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’ next to some small dots, we might feel rather pleased.

That is not how the negotiators at the Foreign Office, recently led by Jonathan Powell, former Chief of Staff to Tony Blair, see it. Or Labour politicians generally. They regard any territorial remnants from the British Empire as an excruciating source of shame and are desperate to withdraw from it.


The whole piece is well worth reading as it emphasises our familiar ruling class disdain for places where taxes are low. Hence their predilection for "gifts" I suppose.

The economist Julian Morris notes that ‘the World Bank consistently ranks Cayman among the top 25 per cent jurisdictions for rule of law, quality of regulation, and other governance indicators’. So why should it be blacklisted or ‘greylisted’ by the European Union or the G7’s ‘Financial Action Task Force’. Naturally, these reports come up with lists of regulations and details about compliance with all the technicalities.

But the Cayman Islands:

requires service providers to verify the beneficial owners of Cayman entities. They must also verify the source of funds used in financial transactions. Failure to comply with these obligations are criminal offences punishable with fines and custodial sentences. Together, these measures are highly effective at discouraging potential money launderers from using Cayman. In other words, the low rate of prosecution of money laundering in Cayman can be explained by Cayman’s tough and rigorously applied laws, which encourage money launderers to go elsewhere.

Morris adds, rather pointedly, that it has rather higher ‘standards than many EU jurisdictions, so to the extent that the blacklisting caused EU-based persons to use EU-based structures rather than Cayman structures, it may have made it more difficult to identify instances of money laundering and terrorism financing’.