My friend Dr. Eduardo Morgan Jr. sees first hand in Panama how the OECD works. While hypocritically chastising smaller jurisdictions and ignoring the same behavior from larger members, the bureaucrats in Paris also keep moving the goal posts, always pushing for greater discrimination against low-tax jurisdictions to avoid being added to their naughty list.
The latest OECD attack on[Panama’s] borders on the ridiculous. Thus, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the Global Forum – which is the latest project by the OECD Cartel to end financial competition by the so-called offshore centers – has just declared that the 12 treaties to avoid double taxation (DTT) are not sufficient to be kept on the “white list” and that we must prepare for a second review to see if we meet the “standards”, which include improvements in data transparency regarding company ownership, and accounting standards (as quoted by Business News Americas, August 4, 2011).
This club of wealthy countries, as branded by The Economist, believes that transparency and effective
exchange of information is the international standard, as opposed to fiscal competition and respect for privacy. The latter (fiscal competition and respect for privacy) are preached and practiced by the United States, the main partner and leader of the G7; the former (transparency and effective exchange of information) is what they want to impose on countries that are not members of the club.
…It is obvious that what the OECD, as all good cartels, pursues is to protect their partners from third-party competition. It is therefore difficult to understand the desire of some to submit to its plans, with the wrongheaded argument that not being in the “gray list” will somehow help Panama’s efforts to become a regional financial center “since it provides a cleaner image of the country abroad and because some international banks have adopted the policy of not operating in countries that are on the gray list, something that had become an obstacle to attract such entities to Panama.”
These are all good reasons for opposing the OECD’s agenda, and helps re-enforce why CF&P has made it a top priority to end the US taxpayer subsidy to the Paris-based bureaucracy.
Prior to the most recent Global Forum, CF&P also warned low-tax jurisdictions against playing along with the OECD, concluding:
No matter what the high-tax lobby claims, the anti-financial privacy agenda is not being pushed to benefit low-tax jurisdictions. They will make that claim, but it is nothing more than the bait intended to lure the next prey on which they will feast.
Simply put, it’s time for the low-tax jurisdictions to stop enabling the OECD’s charade. Otherwise, I hope that Dr. Morgan and other members of nations targeted by the OECD are prepared for the next likely hoop they will be required to jump through: a back-door World Tax Organization through Multilateral Convention.
