The spotlight is certainly on offshore centres at the moment with talk from newly elected President Obama about closing down tax havens, which has been quickly echoed by other world leaders such as Gordon Brown who perhaps sees an opportunity to divert attention from the poor economic situation in his own country.
So what does this mean for Guernsey? "Bring it on" seems to be the upbeat reaction from the local financial community on the grounds that Guernsey already has higher levels of regulation than most onshore jurisdictions. As far as transparency goes, Guernsey has 10 Tax Information and Exchange Agreements in place with various countries, including the United Kingdom and the USA. Given this, it will be interesting to see on what grounds the so called well regulated jurisdictions, who incidentally have been responsible for the mess we are in now, have to place pressure on well regulated j...
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