by Tony Best

Barbados doesn't have any case to answer about being a tax haven.

Just as important, there is no new list of tax havens in which Barbados and a host of its Caribbean neighbours were recently identified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as uncooperative jurisdictions.

That firm assurance has come from the OECD itself, which told the Weekend Nation that a published report distributed around the world yesterday by Agence France Press (AFP), one of Europe's leading news organisations, was erroneous.

"The report put out in this way is wrong and quite frankly I don't know where they got that information from," Nicholas Bray, a top OECD spokesman in Paris, told the Weekend Nation in an interview from his office.

Not on list

"Let me reassure you we are not putting Barbados on a list of tax havens. We took Barbados off a list and that is still the case. It is obviously a case of someone misunderstanding."

The AFP said in its news story from Paris that "data from the (OECD) points to 18 countries in the wider Caribbean region as having tax haven status according to four criteria.

"The four criteria are insignificant or non-existent tax levels, absence of transparency in tax matters, absence of fiscal data exchange with other countries and attractiveness for straw companies with fictitious activities," AFP added.

Among the countries were Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Dominica, Grenada and the Cayman Islands, the news agency reported.

However, Bray said the information for the story might have been taken from an OECD document that was several years old and certainly didn't reflect the current situation.

"There is a clear misunderstanding here," he added.

Indeed, in several OECD documents and statements made since the issue of tax havens first burst onto the international scene about a decade ago, the OECD made it clear that Barbados and its neighbours weren't on any list of unco-operative tax havens.

The issue is particularly sensitive to many Caribbean countries at this time because of proposed legislation, The Stop Tax Haven Act, which United States Senators Barack Obama and Carl Levin are pushing to have enacted by Congress.

Just last week, Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, told a large audience in Wisconsin that he was determined to stop tax havens from operating.

Reached at his office yesterday, Barbados' Ambassador to Washington, Michael King, said nothing had changed to make "Barbados a tax haven, something the OECD recognised".