Bermuda On “Best Tax Havens In World” List
Bermuda has “long been a popular tax haven” according to a story by gobankingrates.com, which ranked the island as one of the “top 10 best tax havens in the world.”
The story said “Bermuda has long been a popular tax haven, said Ravi Ramnarain, an independent certified public accountant. “Wealthy individuals who transfer their assets to these countries could benefit from the fact that it may be deemed illegal [from a general standpoint] for the bankers in these offshore jurisdictions to disclose the identities of investors to third parties,” Ramnarain said.
“Big businesses also turn to Bermuda for low taxation, which levies no corporate tax at all, according to Deloitte. Just over a quarter of all Fortune 500 companies had subsidiaries in Bermuda in 2014, according to the Citizens for Justice report.
“Google, for instance, has routed foreign profits to Bermuda through subsidiaries in Ireland and the Netherlands, a move which could save the company as much as $2 billion a year in taxes, reported Bloomberg.”
The other 9 nations listed are Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Jersey, Ireland, Mauritius, Monaco, Switzerland and the Bahamas.
Finance Minister Bob Richards has addressed the “tax haven” accusation on multiple occasions, once saying: “If there are problems with the UK, the US or anybody in Europe collecting their taxes, it’s because their system is deficient, not because we’ve done something wrong.
“We haven’t set up our country to be a tax haven. The situation we have in Bermuda is that we have a tax structure that goes back over 150 years.
“We haven’t changed our tax system in 150 years so it has to do with the tax systems in the developed countries. If there’s a revenue shortfall, it’s the tax systems in these countries,” said Minister Richards.
In addition, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron said he does “not think it is fair” to refer to Overseas Territories as tax havens, as “they have taken action to make sure that they have fair and open tax systems.”
