It’s not often that the leader of a small country is bold enough to resist the desires of larger or richer countries. But, Dominica’s Prime Minister, Roosevelt Skerritt, did just that on March 23rd.
Speaking in Dominica’s Capital, Roseau, at the opening of an Environmental Conference entitled, “International Ocean Life Symposium”, the Prime Minister declared that his government will no longer be supporting the whale-killing position of the Japanese government in the International Whaling Commission (IWC). He said that his government will be acting in his country’s “national interest”.
For several years now, it has been alleged that several Caribbean countries – the members of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and Suriname – have been supporting Japan at the IWC because the Japanese Whaling Association (JWA) provided them with fish refrigeration facilities.  It has also been claimed in British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) programmes that the JWA paid the IWC membership fees for some of these countries as well as the cost of their delegations’ attendance. These claims were upheld in Dominica by environmentalists who have followed closely the country’s participation in IWC meetings.  Among these persons is a former Environment Minister of a Dominica government, Atherton Martin, who resigned in 2000 in protest over the issue.
In the same year, a, senior official of the Fisheries Agency of Japan, Maseyuku  Komatsu, stated on Australian television that a number of countries have accepted aid in return for backing Japan's efforts to get commercial whaling restarted and described aid as “a major tool”.

It is a classic case of “passing the buck”, but Caribbean jurisdictions that offer offshore financial services will be the victims of lax regulation by the OECD countries – the UK and US in particular.

  Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the US Senate and Congress have both now shown their intention to close down offshore financial services which they call “tax havens”.

  Speaking on March 4th to the US Congress Brown asked: “'But how much safer would everybody's savings be if the whole world finally came together to outlaw shadow banking systems and outlaw offshore tax havens?”   Implicit in what he said is that so-called “tax havens” are a threat to people’s savings even though it is poor banking and investment practices and inefficient regulation in the US and UK in particular that led to the present global financial crisis.

In the midst of a troubling global financial crisis, there is a little good news for the countries of the Caribbean.  The region is to be one of the 20 “countries” of the world on which the Government of Canada will now focus its aid.

The full list of countries, released by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) on February 23rd, is seven African nations, five Asian countries, five Latin American nations, Ukraine, the West Bank and Gaza and “Caribbean”.

80 per cent of CIDA’s $1.5-billion bilateral programming budget, which represents about 53 per cent of Canada's overall development assistance funding, will be targeted towards those countries.

Contrary to a story carried in a Guyana Newspaper on 26th February, Guyana is included in the “Caribbean” countries that will benefit from Canada’s refocused aid which will promote regional integration and regional approaches to common development issues and challenges. Canada has doubled its development assistance to the Caribbean, and is the largest bilateral donor to the region.

The threat to the financial services sector of the Caribbean is growing everyday and is becoming more evident in reports by media who have swallowed hook, line and sinker that so-called "tax havens" are helping US, European and Japanese nationals, both persons and companies, to evade taxation in their home countries.

There is no hard evidence to support this allegation about Caribbean jurisdictions. Yet it persists from governments of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

A recent BBC report claims that the British government "is broke - a record £44bn in the red - and yet one estimate is that the taxman loses £18.5bn a year thanks to tax haven abuse".
The reports specifically identifies British protectorates which it describes in derogatory terms "as the Bounty Bar island tax haven of the Caymans in the Caribbean and the fish-and-chip tax havens closer to home like Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man". It says, "18 of the world's tax havens are Crown Dependencies like Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man or British protectorates like the Caymans, a fag-end of the British Empire in the Caribbean".

Dramatically, the report also states that "one man has targeted tax haven abuse in the Caymans - and his name is Barack Obama. So change for the world's tax havens seems on the way - whether the leaders of the micro-states like it or not".

When the OECD first raised its so-called "Harmful Tax Competition Initiative" (HTCI) aimed at closing down the financial services sector of 41 small jurisdictions around the world which were giving serious competition to the financial institutions of the OECD countries, Caribbean countries were slow to move on the issue.

It was not until it was raised by Antigua and Barbuda at the 21st meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) at Canouan in St Vincent and the Grenadines in July 2000, that CARICOM countries began to take the issue seriously.