Leader of Government Business McKeeva Bush has signed a double taxation agreement (DTA) with the UK on behalf of the Cayman Islands Government. The deal reportedly protects against the risk of individuals or corporate entities being taxed twice on the same earnings. Stephen Timms, MP, who signed on behalf of the UK, said that the agreement includes unprecedented provisions for tax information exchange. It was not stated, however, if a bi-lateral agrement will follow this deal.
In a statement from the Ministry of Financial Services, Tourism & Development Public Relations Unit, it was announced that the LoGB had signed the deal today (15 June) in a ceremony at the UK Treasury. The DTA, which is another type of bi-lateral tax agreement, is the first double treaty to be signed by the Cayman Islands. “We are very pleased to sign this agreement with the United Kingdom today as part of the Cayman Islands' continued commitment to high standards of international cooperation and transparency,” Bush said.
Speaking about the UK’s advantage, Timms said that information exchange is a vital tool in ensuring that governments receive the revenues they need to resource the essential public services on which we all depend. “I would like to congratulate the Cayman Islands Government for signing up to an arrangement which includes unprecedented provisions for tax information exchange that meet international standards of transparency,” he added.
The agreement (see details here) places Cayman another step closer to the OECD’s requirement for a minimum of twelve agreements, which the new government has said it is committed to achieving not least in an effort to remove Cayman from the post G20 'grey list'. Cayman now has nine agreements in place. UK Permanent Secretary for Tax, Dave Hartnett said the information exchange provisions in this arrangement meet OECD standards of tax transparency.
Negotiations with the UK had been ongoing for a bi-lateral agreemen for several years but these had stalled. The previous government had accused the UK of constantly moving the goal posts with regards to that agreement and said that they had been seeking some form of commercial advantage for Cayman’s offshore industry before signing.
Speaking at what was the regular weekly press briefing prior to the election, the former Minister Alden McLaughlin explained that, while the government had been criticised for not signing treaties, the PPM administration had in fact been engaged in negotiations since they took office, but that did not mean they were able to be successful, adding that the government had to be very careful not to put Cayman at a commercial disadvantage. “We don’t want to put Cayman in a position of competitive disadvantage. We want to be compliant with OECD tax exchange standards but we don’t want to give away things other countries haven’t and then lose business,” McLaughlin said in April.
That view, however, has been disputed by some in the offshore community who questioned the wisdom of holding out on exchange agreements. They say that there is probably very little commercial advantage that the government can negotiate as in most cases Cayman is already getting all the business it is likely to get from a given nation, but that not having tax agreements is currently more of a disadvantage than the risk of losing a competitive commercial edge.
Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, a critic of TIEA as ineffective in terms of cracking down on tax haven abuse, has dubbed this DTA treaty as useless frm the UK's point of view. He said it was not a full blown DTA or a a full blown TIEA. "In fact the extraordinary thing is that the information exchange clause is far less onerous than a TIEA. So, for example, there is no reference to the need for the parties to be able to prove beneficial ownership of trusts, companies and other arrangements in their territories, which a TIEA should require," he wrote.
The tax watchdog said that the UK would have as many problems complying as Cayman and Murphy said it would do little to assist Gordon Brown in his camapign against tax havens.