Financial Transparency Coalition

GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands - Caribbean and Atlantic offshore finance centers are hitting back against attempts to portray them as shady tax havens and say world leaders are making them scapegoats for the global downturn.

In the game Jenga, players take turns removing blocks from a tower and balancing them on top, creating a progressively taller, but also increasingly more unstable, structure as the game goes on. The gig is up when a player pulls out a final block and the whole structure collapses with a clatter of wooden bricks and screams of surprise. While the comparison is slightly simplistic, there are numerous ways that Jenga is just like the world’s current economic crisis. In the last few years, there have been many developments which in retrospect look like small blocks being pulled...

No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. Cayman is insolvent, bust, broke, unable to pay its debts. This is not a rumour, this is fact. This fact is confirmed by the speaking notes used by the Hon. McKeeva Bush for a meeting held with senior Cayman civil servants, government boards and private sector business leaders last Thursday, of which I seemed to be the first to secure a copy. The text is here, but I will also reproduce it separately on my blog in case Cayman take it down. The following summarises the current state of play,...

Sunlight Foundation--When President Barack Obama promised in May to raise an additional $210 billion in taxes a year by closing corporate loopholes and cracking down on individual tax cheats, he pointed to an address in the Cayman Islands listed by 12,000 corporations as the kind of abuse his proposals would shut down. "Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world," the President said.