The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A Cabinet Minister yesterday slammed as “a bold-faced lie” international media reports suggesting she implied that the Bahamas would continue undermining the global crackdown on so-called ‘tax cheats’.

Hope Strachan, minister of financial services, denied making the comment attributed to her, and accused the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of smearing and besmirching both herself and the Bahamas.

Her anger was directed at the ICIJ’s main report on the ‘leak’ of 1.3 million documents from the Registrar General’s Department, published on its website, which quoted an alleged statement she made to journalists.

The ICIJ piece concluded: “Recently, when countries met to forge an agreement on swapping tax information between nations, organisers declared that soon tax cheats would have ‘nowhere left to hide’.

“The Bahamas’ minister of financial services struck another note with reporters, concluding: ‘We got everything we wanted.’”

Mrs Strachan, though, denied that she had ever attended such a meeting. She told Tribune Business: “I wish for the record to state categorically that this story is false, as I, C.V. Hope Strachan, minister of financial services since January 2015, have never attended any meeting of countries to forge an agreement on swopping tax information between nations.

“Nor have I made such a statement to reporters or, in fact, anyone else. Further, I am not aware of anyone else who would have made such a statement on behalf of the Government of the Bahamas. It is a bold-faced lie, and should never have been printed or attributed to me.”

Mrs Strachan emphasised that it was not her ministry, but rather the Ministry of Finance, that attended OECD-related tax information exchange meetings on the Bahamas’ behalf.

“That’s what concerns me,” she added. “To attribute such a statement to me is definitely inaccurate in every respect. I am not the Minister, and the Ministry, who attends those meetings.”

Mrs Strachan added that the ICIJ, and other recent international media reports on the Bahamas and its financial services sector, seemed to have been crafted to portray this nation and its financial services industry in the worst possible light.

“We are concerned, because we know a lot of the implications flowing from it paints a picture about the Bahamas that is not true,” the Minister told Tribune Business of the negative media offensive.

“We are a compliant jurisdiction. The OECD peer reviews gave us a clean bill of health; that the Bahamas is largely compliant. If they’re the regulator, and they give us a clean bill of health, I don’t know what more we can do.

“It [the articles] paint a picture of what the Bahamas is truly not about. They play loose and distort the timelines and everything to paint the picture they wanted.”

The fall-out from the ‘leak’ of corporate information, such as director/officer names and annual returns for some 175,000 Bahamas-domiciled entities, continued yesterday.

Both the major Swiss and Canadian-owned financial institutions based in this nation came under the microscope from their ‘home country’ media for the extent of their incorporation/registered agent activities in the Bahamas.

UBS and Credit Suisse, both of which have a substantial presence in the Bahamas, were said to have incorporated more than one out of every 10 Bahamas-domiciled entities - some 9,500 - featured in the data ‘leak’.

Similar scrutiny was applied to the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and CIBC FirstCaribbean for collectively registering 2,000 Bahamas-incorporated entities over the same period.

RBC was said to have registered 847 companies, CIBC some 632, and Scotiabank a further 481 between 1990 and May 2016.

However, conspicuously absent from any of the media coverage was any suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of Bahamas-based financial services providers.

The information obtained is largely files that would have been available to the public anyway, and the impression to-date is of an investigation that has failed to find a true ‘smoking gun’ and may have missed the mark.

“The records in the registry were either there in terms of being physically able to go in, or online,” Mrs Strachan said.

Acknowledging criticism about the inability to properly search for comprehensive corporate information online at the Companies Registry, she added that electronic moves had only been initiated this year.