Overlooking white sands and turquoise water, One Cable Beach is the latest oceanfront condominium to be built on the sun-drenched coastline of the Bahamas. Yet its top selling point is not the natural beauty of its surroundings. Instead it is the financial privacy it offers investors trying to escape from a looming crackdown on tax evasion.
Jason Kinsale, the developer, says almost two-thirds of his customers, especially from Europe and Canada, are attracted by the residence rights. They allow property buyers to tell their banks they are tax resident in the Bahamas. “It is a big driver. People don’t like to pay tax in their home country.”
The goal should be to make the Bahamas “the Monaco of the Caribbean”, says Ryan Pinder, former minister of financial services on the islands. He told MPs in the summer that offering tax residency to wealthy people would create a lifeline for the Bahamian economy at a time when the global crackdown on evasion was eroding its conventional offshore business.
But time is running out for investors wanting to dodge a transparency drive designed to squeeze tax evaders out of existence. By the end of the year countries from Albania to Vanuatu will have instructed financial services companies to begin collecting details of bank balances, interest, dividends and income from insurance products earned by clients living overseas.
The data will start criss-crossing the world from September, eventually ending up at the tax authority of the investor’s home country – potentially triggering investigations.
This global move is forcing a decisive break with the longstanding commitment of dozens of tax havens to protect the privacy of their clients. The islands, small states and principalities that built their prosperity on secrecy have all been forced to open up.
The US made the first move: its 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has forced foreign banks to start handing over their clients’ data or face a 30 per cent tax. More than 100 other countries from China to the Cook Islands have followed suit, promising to exchange bank information through a system known as the Common Reporting Standard.
Under both Fatca and the CRS, information will be automatically transferred, representing a step change over previous transparency efforts that required investigators to have good reason to request tax information from other governments. After years when successive clampdowns resembled a game of cat and mouse between tax authorities and evaders, the latest initiatives have been hailed as a breakthrough, albeit one weakened by the US adoption of a different system to the rest of the world.
The transparency drive has had a big impact on the funds – estimated to be nearly $10tn – held offshore. As former bastions of secrecy from Switzerland to Panama bow to international pressure, billions of dollars are moving around the world in search of safer havens just as the options are shrinking.