THE 4TH ANNUAL DISTINGUISHED OWEN S. ARTHUR MEMORIAL LECTURE (DOSAM), UWI

It was a distinct honour to deliver the 4th DOSAM at UWI Cave Hill campus earlier this month, on a topic that former Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur fought long and hard for — Tax Justice. He took on this challenge not just for Barbados, but for the Caribbean more broadly. The video of the lecture is here, the script is here, and the full study on which the lecture was based is here.

Currently, only 16/36 or just 44% of Caribbean territories are independent states, meaning that the Caribbean is still mostly, in terms of number of territories, a colonized region. Population size by territory varies widely in the Caribbean — from Saba with about 2,000 persons, to Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, each with about 11–12 million persons. By population therefore, the Caribbean is more independent than colonized, with over 33 million having had their independence for over a century.

The history of colonization and extraction is fundamental to the issue of Tax Justice in, and for the Caribbean, as well as other (former) colonies. Colonization, slavery, and sugar production are empirically demonstrated to have underpinned Europe’s industrialization and wealth accumulation. This wealth was and still is so important to Europe that the process of decolonization and independence globally, gave birth to the tax frameworks that exist today, in two important ways:

1. It is a well-documented fact that colonizers created ‘tax havens’ in the Caribbean and elsewhere, to hide their sugar and slavery wealth during the independence movement.
2. The global tax framework is dominated by a powerful network of bilateral double tax treaties between ‘source’ countries in the Global South and ‘resident’ countries in the Global North. And it is this more than 100 years old, 3,000-strong bilateral double tax treaty network that allows the legal avoidance of taxes, which is at the heart of the tax loss problem — more so than the ‘tax havens’ in the Caribbean and the Global South more broadly.

NO RIGHT-MINDED, INDEPENDENT THINKER FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH COULD SUPPORT THE OECD’S GMT

According to the Tax Justice Network (TJN) OECD member states are responsible for 78% or USD374 billion in global tax losses annually, and the OECD itself “failed to detect and prevent its own members’ corporate tax abuse…and in some cases, pushed OECD member countries to rollback their tax transparency.” The TJN further reported that “secrecy jurisdictions — which are countries that provide opportunities for non-residents to hide their identity and their wealth from the rule of law — are not led by small, palm-fringed islands, but by major economies.” But based on the Global North’s powerful propaganda machinery, “Caribbean Island” has become synonymous with ‘tax haven’, and ‘tax haven’ has come to be associated with palm trees and white sand in a powerful and pervasive way; even the algorithms have adopted these false narratives, such that online search results for ‘Tax Haven’ is dominated by tropical island imagery. All while the USA and Switzerland are the world’s most prolific tax secrecy jurisdictions.

There will be no tax justice unless ALL countries are assessed objectively and recognized universally, for their true harmful tax haven status. No exceptions, not even the Vatican. Further, there will be no tax justice even if those tax havens are eliminated globally, unless we renegotiate unfair double tax treaties, which prescribe how taxing rights are divided, and allow the legal avoidance of taxes. And finally, the UN Tax convention presents the only opportunity for inclusive dialogue towards global tax justice.

Demanding reparations in the absence of the above is misguided at best. The OECD exists to pursue the interests of its members (largely the USA, UK and EU), even at the expense of others. In its over 60-year existence, the OECD “has still never allowed a majority-Black member country to join, and continues to exploit anti-Black racism to preserve its power”. But the OECD has somehow managed to bully the whole world apart from Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka into signing the Global Minimum Tax (GMT) that up to today the US can’t even legislate! Caribbean leaders who (implicitly) support the OECD’s Pillars and GMT and/or those who do not support the UN Tax Convention should be examined for their courage and leadership in the pursuit of decolonization, their expertise in tax justice matters, their loyalty to country, and for possible “imperfect negotiation strategies.”

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