Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

"Internationally, the challenge will be to ensure that the countries and jurisdictions that have promised increased transparency live up to their commitments. The OECD, tasked with a mandate to monitor their performance, will be watching like a hawk."

This is the last sentence of an article signed by Angel Gurria dated 24 April 2009.

Watching like a hawk?

Unfortunately the experience of the OECD demonstrates that the organisation is everything but a hawk for jurisdictions that do not implement the international commitments.

The non respect of the OECD Anti-bribery Convention illustrates the failure to act like a hawk, all the more than the jurisdiction that is currently leading the cabal against the OECD and Angel Gurria is the one that has not responded yet to some key recommendations, and especially despite an injunction last year, the enforcement of the liability of legal persons for foreign bribery.

On 14 April 2002, the OECD was pleased to announce that Panama has made a commitment to improve the transparency of its tax and regulatory systems and establish effective exchange of information for tax matters with OECD countries by 31 December 2005.


We know that this commitment was a charade and the jurisdiction was qualified “tax haven" early April 2009.



What a Panama Law firm is saying is worth analysing, as it is representative of the state of mind in most jurisdictions that are on the OECD grey list:


“Get your money out now! The ones who get out first, get out with the most on the best of all possible terms. Open offshore corporations, foundations, bank accounts and stock brokerage accounts now before it is too late and you will be prevented from doing so or penalized for doing so. The USA constitution, if they still use that up there, prevents retroactive laws. They should grandfather your offshore structures in and allow you to keep them. If they impose a tax on money going offshore in the near future you will escape this since your money would have been moved before any such tax is made into law. If they tax money coming back into the USA, just leave it outside. You can buy real estate offshore. You can open stock brokerage accounts offshore. You can open businesses offshore. Start to think globally like they do.”

In a recent article the Washington Post calls to end the tax haven business all the more than bank secrecy is not a terribly attractive business model for a national economy.

Some professionals and politicians in Switzerland still do not realise the paradigm shift.