Caribbean and Atlantic offshore finance centres are hitting back against attempts to portray them as shady tax havens and say world leaders are making them scapegoats for the global downturn.
Leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) economic powers, meeting in Pittsburgh on Friday on global economic issues, launched a campaign in April to name and shame tax havens and penalise those who failed to tighten tax standards and transparency.
Spurred by public outrage over the big bonus-earning bankers and high-profile frauds by wealthy financiers, G20 governments have pointed fingers at tax havens, many of them on tiny, beach-rimmed islands in the Caribbean.
As US investigators probe Swiss bank accounts of suspected tax cheats, leading offshore jurisdictions say they resent being cast as hide-outs.
"It's not fair," said McKeeva Bush, the Minister of Financial Services of the Cayman Islands.
He and other policy makers and business chiefs from offshore centres say the "finger pointing" by the world's richest and most powerful governments is hypocritical and seeks to shift blame away from their own failed policies and lax regulations.
"Cayman had nothing to do with the investing in sub-prime derivatives, (the) US housing bubble or gross over-leveraging of the main banks," said Grand Cayman property developer Michael Ryan. "It's a nice diversion to blame the evil guys in the Caribbean instead of laying blame where it belongs," said Grand Cayman property developer Michael Ryan.
Timothy Ridley, a former chairman of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, believes the crackdown on tax havens stems largely from fear of competition by "those... who wish to retain control of the world's capital and to tax it".