Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON (AP) — Many Americans know that China holds the most U.S. Treasury debt, followed by Japan. But who would expect a group of Caribbean countries would collectively come in fifth?

LONDON -- In the latest development in the global crackdown on tax havens, two of the world's biggest offshore financial jurisdictions were scheduled on Thursday, to sign their 12th Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEA), officially taking them off the "grey list" of offshore tax havens put together by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The OECD is holding a meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information on September 1-2 in Los Cabos, Mexico. There are three objectives. The first is to discuss creating new ways of concluding Tax Information Exchange Agreements. The second is to decide whether the Cayman and St Kitts & Nevis legislation that allows unilateral information exchange is acceptable for information exchange purposes. The third is to set up a peer review monitoring group on information exchange. Documents on the first two agenda items are here. The document on monitoring is here.

Recent press reports suggest Cayman is at the eye of a storm. To take an article from the UK’s Daily Telegraph of 28 May 2009 as an example1, it reported: