(CNS Business): Small offshore financial centres such as the Cayman Islands ought to lobby their governments to ensure they become part of the discussion on the automatic exchange of information with onshore governments rather than face the worry of an uneven playing field in which each jurisdiction has developed its own levels of co-operation, said Itai Grinberg, formerly of the US Treasury and now with Georgetown University Law Center. Speaking at the STEP Caribbean conference held this week at The Ritz-Carlton, Cayman, he said that getting in on the discussions now taking place would be an advantage for the Caribbean. Countries were ramping up their individual responses to the OECD’s push to end banking secrecy using a range of mechanisms, he said.

(CNS Business): Almost 90 percent of a €436 million bond payment made by the Greek government to investors who rejected the country's debt revamping deal in March went to Dart Management, according to The New York Times, which described it as “a secretive investment fund based in the Cayman Islands”, and cited “people with direct knowledge of the transaction”. The Times called Dart “one of the best known of the so-called vulture funds, which have a track record of buying the distressed bonds of nearly bankrupt countries — and if they do not get paid, suing the governments for the money”. The leading US paper said that Dart and another big vulture fund, Elliott Associates, perfected that strategy during the various Latin American debt crises in years past.

(CNS Business): Offshore financial centres must get to grips with greed and corruption within their territories. Although such concepts may be accepted as part of island-life, the whole world was watching, warned former regulator Helen Hatton of Sator Regulatory Consulting. Hatton said she had come across examples of corruption in a number of jurisdictions that she had worked in. “Not as simple as people taking backhanders,” she explained, “but people suppressing conflicts of interest in order to do little favours, as well as people failing to fulfill their proper duty and responsibility.” Also standing in the way of success for OFCs were greed and xenophobic attitudes. “I’ve come across some frightening examples of greed,” she warned. “Xenophobia is a real issue and that extends into the work force, into schools and so on.”

(CNS Business): Although the tourism sector will be expecting to benefit from Cayman Airways’ two new direct flights to Dallas and Panama, officials hope the national flag carrier’s new routes will also boost other areas of business. Cayman Airways President and CEO, Fabian Whorms, said the routes will provide new and exciting vacation destinations for locals but merchants will also benefit from direct access to markets with more affordable merchandise. The Chamber of Commerce has particularly welcomed the direct flight to Panama a route that it has championed for several years as it believes the weekly flight will increase business opportunities.

(CNS Business): Continuing a relentless campaign to correct misinformation published about the Cayman Islands, Anthony Travers, Chairman of the Cayman Islands Stock Exchange and former chair of Cayman Finance has taken former Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau to task for an opinion piece published in the New York Times. “The secrecy laws in these tax havens are at the root of serious crimes: fraud, money laundering and international terrorism,” Morgenthau wrote. “Follow the trail of nearly any major financial scandal and you will enter one or more of these notorious jurisdictions.” Responding in a letter to the Times, Travers says Morgenthau continues to conflate illegal tax evasion and lawful tax avoidance and that the “allegations of bank secrecy in the Cayman Islands are the purest nonsense”.

(CNS Business): Some twelve years after finishing his Professional Practice Course and a winding road through the police, the civil service and politics, former Cabinet minister Charles Clifford was finally called to the Bar on Friday 4 May. Having completed his articles in judicial administration, the former tourism minister said during his admission speech that he had no regrets about his unusual and circuitous route to the Bar. “I do not regret the deviations that I have taken along this journey to becoming an attorney-at-law. I truly believe that those deviations were for the greater good,” he said before announcing his intention to open his own practice. (Photo Dennie Warren Jr)

(CNS Business): Eduardo Saverin, one of the co-founders of Facebook, had renounced his American citizenship in what seemed to be a transparent ploy to escape a hefty bill from the IRS in the wake of Facebook’s upcoming IPO, TIME Magazine reports. However, Saverin maintains that his renunciation of American citizenship, which actually took place last September, wasn’t a ploy to skip out on American taxes, but rather an attempt to free himself from burdensome restrictions on American investors abroad. “US citizens are severely restricted as to what they can invest in and where they can maintain accounts,” the Wall Street Journal quotes a spokesman for Saverin saying. “Many foreign funds and banks won’t accept Americans. This was a financial rather than a tax motive.”

(Bloomberg): Hedge funds act as shadow banks and should be added to the list of organizations in need of regulation, according to Raimund Roeseler, head of banking supervision at Germany’s financial regulator Bafin. Shadow-banking definitions by the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee are too narrow, Roeseler said. Bafin is working on its own proposals to regulate the sector and will provide them for the discussion at the FSB, he said. “We probably won’t be able to fix every loophole, but we’ll get a good chunk -- and make dodging rules more tedious and expensive,” Roeseler, 50, said in an interview at his Bonn- based office last week. “Anything already calling itself a hedge fund should be covered, that’s for sure.”

(CNS Business): Offshore financial centres such as the Cayman Islands are likely to be front and centre stage in tax debates during the US presidential election, as highlighted by political strategist and columnist Donna Brazile, who spoke at the STEP Caribbean Conference launch on Sunday. In light of the anticipated increased focus on OFCs in the coming months, former Cayman Islands Monetary Authority chairman Tim Ridley detailed the ways in which OFCs could survive and prosper through this heightened scrutiny. Private client professionals should note that wealth was being generated by new sources other than within the traditional countries in the west and that the west had developed an aggressive stance against offshore jurisdictions.

(CNS Business): The Cayman Islands Law Society is committed to ensuring that as many Caymanian students as possible are given the opportunity to qualify as attorneys-at-law, according to its president, Charles Jennings. At a time when, due to the global recession, it is getting harder for law graduates in England to obtain training contracts with law firms, Cayman firms actually maintained, and in some cases even increased, the number of positions on offer, he noted. Responding to the attorney general’s recent speech in the Legislative Assembly calling for members of the islands’ legal fraternity to face their moral obligation to train the next generation of lawyers, Jennings pointed out that obtaining Articles is not a right for law graduates but is earned on merit and is subject to supply and demand.

(IFC Review): Banking executives are predicting that the majority of banks will miss the deadlines for complying with new requirements under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act for reporting on foreign bank accounts and assets held by US taxpayers, reports Accountancy Today. The controversial FATCA provisions were included by Congress in the HIRE Act of 2010, requiring foreign financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service on the holdings of US taxpayers. Foreign banks and governments have balked at many of the provisions, arguing that they impinge on national sovereignty, and the provisions have provoked concern among expatriate groups such as American Citizens Abroad. 

(Miami Herald): They came bearing a colorful brochure, new logo and hope that after years of disaster and crisis, Haiti will return to the tourism map. “Everyone has sand and beach,” said Elsa Baussan Noel, tourism adviser to Haitian President Michel Martelly and a third-generation hotelier. “We have a pretty interesting religion mix. We have different music. We have artisans. We have culture.” Noel was among more than 20 Haitian hotelier and wannabe hoteliers who worked the halls at the two-day Caribbean Hotel & Resort Investment (CHRIS) Summit, which ended Tuesday in downtown Miami. The Haiti delegation was by far the largest representing any one country.

(CNS Business): Caribbean Utilities Company (CUC) is now talking to two renewable energy developers over the provision of green energy to its grid. The proposals being considered by Grand Cayman’s power provider are two 5 megawatt solar photovoltaic power plants and one 3MW small scale wind turbine project. CUC said details on the companies selected will be revealed once the contracts and agreements are finalized. CUC said that over the last few years it has been evaluating alternative forms of power but it was only recently that it began to appear cost effective.

(CNS Business): While the nursing profession constantly evolves and reinvents itself, it would do well to also remember the core values of its past at the same time, according to Dr Karen Stefaniak from the University of Kentucky Hospital, who opened this year’s Nurses Conference, held this week at the Marriott Beach Resort. Dr Stefaniak said that nurses were increasingly required to take on the role of advocate for their patients, but that was not a new role as the nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale had done just that back in the 19th Century, not only fighting for her patients but for the rights of nurses as well.